Autonomous Deployment of Sensors through Airdrop Operations

Autonomous emplacement of sensors and unmanned ground vehicles by airdrop requires that the payload stay upright after impact and that the parachute, container, and any impact attenuation is derigged from the payload automatically after landing. The 5-50 lb payload scale of sensors and small unmanned ground vehicles offers tremendous freedom for rapid innovation in airdrop technology. The design space of feasible concepts which would satisfy all of the requirements for this project is large, so the key to approaching this problem is a thorough design space exploration. The engineering team at Earthly Dynamics Corporation (EDC) will leverage their extensive experience in developing novel and robust airdrop sensing and actuation technologies to perform a broad concept analysis study to produce a unique set of designs with the best combination of performance and cost. Promising designs will be down-selected through an analysis of alternatives performed in collaboration with the stakeholders. EDC’s mechanical and electrical design capabilities will be used to develop preliminary designs, and EDC’s specialized multibody dynamic impact simulation tools will be used to perform virtual landing studies. EDC’s extensive experience prototyping and airdropping innovative hardware will be employed in the fabrication and drop testing of functional, scale prototype systems.