A Flying Car?

Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute received $988 000 late last year to develop an autonomous flight system for DARPA's military flying car concept called the Transformer. If DARPA had its way, the Transformer will be a four-wheeled off road military vehicle that can also transform into a Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) aircraft. It will have a range of 250 nautical miles on a single full tank of fuel, seating for four, and a payload of 1 000 pounds.

The Transformer will greatly improve mobility for ground troops. The soldiers will not only move to and fro the battlefield faster, it will also allow them to fly over difficult terrain or terrain with possible enemy troops.

One of the many challenges of developing the Transformer is the flight system. The ordinary soldier will not be able to fly an aircraft and so the flight system of the vehicle will have to be largely automatic. That's where Carnegie Mellon comes in. Their robotics institute have already won DARPA's Urban Challenge, which is a race to create an automatic car, in 2007 and I would say they are well prepared.

The rest of the Transformer will be developed by AAI and Lockheed Martin, who are creating overall design concepts, and Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne, who is developing the engines.

The Beast of Kandahar

This mysterious UAV dubbed "The Beast of Kandahar" has surfaced in many photos in recent years. It first appeared in the skies of Kandahar, Afghanistan in 2009 and the US Air Force confirmed that they did indeed operate a stealth drone called the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel and that the drone is the product of Lockheed's Skunk Works, which is also responsible for the U-2, the SR-71 Blackbird, the F-117 Nighthawk, the F-22 Raptor, and the F-35 Lightning II. However, that was about all that was revealed about this mysterious aircraft.

Pictures of the RQ-170 Sentinel right now show that it does not carry any weapons. So what is it used for? Reconnaissance is definitely part of its function but with so many other drones operating in Afghanistan, it certainly is unlikely that information collection is the only function of the drone. Well, according to Bill Sweetman, a blogger that maintains AviationWeek's Ares blog and the undisputed civilian expert of the RQ-170 at this point states that from looking at the belly shape of the Beast, it is most likely configured to carry "a high-powered microwave source" to fry electronic equipment such as radars and weapons computers or as an electronic jamming platform.

However, right now, the secret drone is more likely jamming radars than using a high-powered microwave weapon. Only four months ago, the US Air Force gave Lockheed Martin $230 000 to develop a microwave energy weapon concept and a month later gave BAE Systems $150 000 to test the effectiveness of microwaves on computers.

It is interesting to note that the RQ-170 Sentinel is similar in appearance to the US Navy's X-47B Stealth UAV drone.

Anti Gravity Helicopter?!