DARPA, a central research and development organization within the United States Department of War, put four autonomous unmanned ground vehicles through their first end-to-end test at Fort Knox, Kentucky, on Oct. 15, sending them as a team from a satellite-imagery tip all the way to a simulated strike on an enemy position, with a human […]

The Pentagon’s top research agency wants a nuclear reactor that can run itself, and it has hired the team that built America’s last space reactor to prove it can be done. DARPA has awarded Space Nuclear Power Corporation, a small Los Alamos, New Mexico, company known as SpaceNukes, an agreement to build a Kilopower reactor […]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s advanced research arm, has awarded the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory a contract worth up to $499.8 million to keep the lab working on DARPA engineering, development and research projects through October 2031. The U.S. Department of War announced the award on Oct. 14. Under the […]

America’s mad scientists all have one dream: DARPA money. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, regularly throws round sweet, sweet tax dollars to push the envelope on any number of things, leading to such spinoffs as the very network carrying these words to you. Not every DARPA project ends in revolution though– like the latest DARPA Lift Challenge, whose goal was to see the creation of a vehicle that could perform Vertical Take Off And Landing with a payload 4x its own weight. We’ve embedded the ‘look back’ video below.

We hoped for something revolutionary, something bizzare, something really, really cool– and there were absolutely entries on the field that met all of those superlatives. Unfortunately, sometimes conventional designs are the convention for a reason , and the overall winner by AVIDrone, Inc. was just a very well made electric helicopter. One big lift rotor, one little tail rotor– aside from clever details in the solid-state batteries and carbon-fiber construction, it is a totally normal aircraft… albeit one that could lift 3.84x its dry weight, or 112 lb of payload. Interestingly a battery-powered hexrotor drone took home second place with a 3.64:1 lift ratio. Perhaps the big shock was not seeing combustion engines until third place: another helicopter, this time with a turbine engine. So much for energy density!

Some of the other more bizzare– if less performant–entries did get prizes to further their development, so we’ll likely see them back for the 2028 version of the challenge. Some of the concepts visible were covered here on Hackaday, like turning the drone body into a giant lift rotor , so perhaps one of you will have the bright idea that brings home a million in the next round of the contest.