Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories (LM ATL) in Cherry Hill, NJ, is currently leading a team to design and build a nano-scale air vehicle under DARPA's Nano Air Vehicle program. Lockheed Martin's proposed vehicle, the SAMARAI, is approximately 6 centimeters long and is based on a rotating single-wing design similar to a maple seed, or samara. The vehicle is driven by a fuel-powered jet thruster at the tip of the wing and is primarily a solid structure with a very small number of mechanical moving parts. The SAMARAI vehicle will weigh approximately 8 grams, and will be capable of carrying a 2 gram payload to a remote location over 1000 meters away, guided by an operator with a remote control station using imagery downloaded from a miniature camera onboard the vehicle. LM ATL leads a team that includes Lockheed Martin Advanced Development Programs (Skunk Works), the Lockheed Martin-managed Sandia National Laboratories, AeroCraft, ATK Corporation, and the University of Pennsylvania. In this paper we describe the SAMARAI system concept and the rationale underlying it, some of the issues and results to date in the aerodynamic design of the vehicle and in the guidance, navigation, and control (GN&C) of the vehicle, and conclude with some concepts for operation and potential applications of the system.
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