DARPA Launches $6.5 Million Challenge to Reinvent Heavy-Lift Drones

DARPA challenges innovators to create muscular drones

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

Heavy-lift drones, the workhorses of the drone ecosystem, face a significant obstacle to their widespread adoption for military and commercial uses: their payload-to-weight ratio is low, typically far below one-to-one for multirotor UAVs.

Hoping to solve this problem, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has issued a challenge to UAV manufacturers, universities and individual innovators, to develop a drone system capable of breaking through the payload weight barrier.

More than 100 teams are expected to compete for $6.5 million in prize money, in the DARPA Lift Challenge Competition, which will take place August 6 through 9, at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. The Challenge is seeking to encourage the development of novel drone designs, producing UAVs capable of carrying payloads more than four times their weight.

Phillip Smith, DARPA program manager in charge of the competition, said the Challenge is aimed at spurring the production of a new generation of heavy-lift UAVs, capable of outperforming manned aircraft when it comes to transporting the biggest payloads.

“In general, helicopters at their very best, the specialized ones, can carry as much weight or as much payload as they are heavy. If you have a 1,000-pound aircraft, it can carry 1,000 pounds of cargo or payload of weapons, or whatever it is, such as fertilizer for agriculture,” he said.

Most manned aircraft have payload-to-weight rations below those of cargo copters, at around one-to- point-five. Multirotor drones typically have even lower ratios, at about the one-to-point-two or -point-three.

“If you’re at 100 pounds, you’re carrying 20 or 30 pounds of payload. And because of the costs and scaling laws, that has made carrying large payloads very expensive, to the point where it’s prohibitively expensive for many industries and applications,” Smith said.

Dramatically increasing the lifting power of drones would significantly lower the cost of unmanned vertical-lift transport, opening up the use of heavy-lift drones to numerous new applications. The result would be similar to the innovation that Henry Ford created with the introduction of mass production of the Model T.

“He essentially decreased the cost and all of a sudden it exploded and it took over. It changed the way that we live as humans. The reusable rocket that we’re seeing right now is the same kind of concept,” Smith said.

More than three quarters of a century of innovation

Created in the late 1950s in response to Russia’s launch of the Sputnik satellite, DARPA serves as the research and development branch of the U.S. military. It is responsible for the creation of such game-changing inventions and innovations as the internet and stealth technology.

“This is an organization that says, ‘What do we need in ten, 20, 50 years?’ And we invest in a number of different ideas and attempt to keep on pushing the boundary of what’s physically, humanly and engineeringly possible,” Smith said.

DARPA drives technological innovation in two ways, developing defense-oriented programs on its own and issuing challenges, opening up opportunities for people and entities outside of the military establishment to come up with novel solutions to technological problems.

For the Challenge, teams are required to build a drone weighing 55 pounds or less, including motors, fuel and/or batteries. The drones are required to fly a fixed, five-mile course carrying a payload of at least 110 pounds.

“If you had a 55-pound drone, that 4:1 payload ratio would yield 220 pounds of payload. That takes you over that Part 107. But we got a 44807 exemption from the FAA, which allows us to do it under these parameters,” Smith said.

Entrants will be required to fly their drones over a designated course for a total of five miles, the first four miles carrying their payload. Then after dropping the payload off, the drone will finish the course’s last mile unloaded and alight in a specific landing spot.

“It’s a very simple leaderboard,” Smith said. As soon as the drone completes the course, providing that they don’t break the course boundaries or time restrictions, the team’s payload-to-weight ratio score, which will serve as their ranking, will be posted. “Then for all the subsequent flights, everyone will try to beat those scores.”

At the end of the competition, cash prizes will be awarded to the teams with the top three scores.

Broad participation encouraged

To attract the participation across a broad swath of innovators, DARPA established fairly open entry requirements. There was only one significant stipulation: although international teams were encouraged to participate, the Challenge requires that the team leader has to be an American, or in the case of corporate teams, an American-based company.

Challenge organizers originally received applications from more than 480 potential entries. After several months of development and tracking the submissions, the list of potential participants was whittled down to about 200, then 131 and finally 115 teams.

“We’re hoping that it holds steady at 115, but this is aviation, this is development, experimentation. People are going to have crashes. They’re going to have parts delays and things like that. There’s a possibility we’ll go a little bit lower by the time we get to Dayton,” Smith said.

Participating teams represent a broad swath of the drone-producing ecosystem, including existing small and medium-sized drone producers as well as manufacturing companies that specialize in other industries outside of drone production.

“We have a number of universities. We have garage enthusiasts that are literally sending us pictures of their drones in their living room or in their garage. And then we have one or two government organizations as well that have gotten together and decided to try and compete as well,” he said.

Companies on list of banned drones ineligible

The entry requirements do however preclude the global leader in the production of heavy-lift drones from taking part. China-based DJI and other companies based in countries deemed by the Department of Defense to pose high security risks are ineligible to participate in the competition.

Other than this ban, entry requirements for the Challenge posed fewer restrictions than would be imposed on the producers of drones for exclusively military applications. For example, because the Challenge is not only for developing military applications, entrants don’t have to ensure that all of the components of their UAVs have to be NDAA-compliant.

“We decided that this is about innovation and exploring the space. And so, the best way to do that is to look all around the world and to see what parts are out there,” Smith said.

“There’s a second component of this. If we can make this breakthrough in aviation it will incentivize the sub-supplier base here in America with the new FCC regulations,” he said “So hopefully we will get investment and development of sub-supplier parts because they now know that there is a future market here that is so much better than what we see globally, that there is a profit incentive and margin.”

Later on, if the Challenge results in winners receiving defense contracts for their products, they will be required to be in compliance with the NDAA.

“It’s going to be a really fun event. Great for friends and family to come, bring the kids and watch new history being made with the DARPA Lift Challenge, old history in the museum, and then they can go over to Flight Fest and build and fly airplanes themselves,” Smith said.

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