Apprehension of High-altitude Aircraft and Balloons (AHAB)

This SBIR solicitation is a direct response to the challenges posed for the timely, safe defeat, and recovery of high altitude aerial assets in a manner which eliminates hazards to the public at large. Beyond the essential need to defeat high-altitude slow-moving systems which unlawfully enter U.S. airspace, it is incredibly valuable for intelligence purposes to safely recover the payload of these systems to maximize the opportunity of exploitation of the captured system.  The proposed innovation for this program is the development of a modular grappling capture and recovery payload (MGCaRP) at the expected operational altitudes of the target surveillance platforms that can deployed from a lightweight and high altitude unmanned air vehicle. Addittionally this projects aims to develop and test a vision-based identification and targeting system (VBITS) to specifically identify the target platform, track the target in real time, and coordinate flight control between the host aircraft and/or deployed payload to enact a capture maneuver. The MGCaRP system is intended to be a common launch tube (CLT) deployed payload that grappled to the aerial target, compromises the vehicle’s buoyancy, and releases a chute for controlled decent and return of the target asset. ESAero intends to perform the concept development, preliminary design, and detail design of the MGCaRP for a host aircraft to deploy against a target.