The big brains at DARPA are at it again, this time teaming up with Oklahoma State University to develop unmanned aerial vehicles that will be small enough to fit into a soldier’s pocket. The heart of the project is the experimental propulsion system that has no moving parts and utilizes plasma thrusters. The need for such a tiny UAV comes after the realization that most of the unmanned reconnaissance vehicles used at the moment are poor indoors and in urban areas. OSU’s UAV would allow all soldiers to carry UAVs and see what they’re getting into before hand.
And what else is OSU cooking up for DARPA? “One of our projects is to keep an aircraft in the air for five years without landing,” an aerospace student told the Daily O’Collegian. “The other is to put an aircraft in a ballistic missile, which would serve as a launching system, the aircraft would fly out of the missile and provide us with immediate surveillance anywhere in the world within 45 minutes.”
