Air vehicles delivering critical supplies to ground troops could soon simply
disappear into thin air after dropping their payload, reducing troops’
environmental footprint.
The project, which is being spearheaded by the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is known as the “inbound, controlled,
air-releasable, unrecoverable systems” (ICARUS) program.
“The main goal is to
be able to deliver supplies whether they … [are] things like batteries, water,
medical supplies to teams of either military or humanitarian personnel,” Troy
Olsson, ICARUS’ program manager, told National Defense.
The vehicle,
after dropping off its payload, would then disappear after being triggered by an
operator or environmental factors, such as sunlight or temperature.
While
the idea may seem too futuristic to be true, ICARUS builds off a previous DARPA
project known as the “vanishing programmable resources” (VAPR) program, Olsson
said.
“The goal of the VAPR program is to build transient or vanishing
microsystems, so think of small-scale wireless sensor devices that can vanish on
command,” he said. “Part of that program was to make things like circuit boards
[and] packaging.”
One approach to that was a vanishing polymer, he
said.
DARPA worked with the University of Illinois, Cornell and Georgia
Tech on VAPR. Recently, there have been major advancements in the program that
led agency officials to believe creating a disappearing delivery vehicle was
feasible, he said.
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