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The first round of voting has closed at DARPA's UAVforge.net website, which the agency has set up to enable the crowdsourced design of a small perch-and-stare unmanned aircraft.The 1,300-plus members of the site were invited to vote on concept videos posted by 48 teams. The highest ranked, with a score of 4.128 out of a possible 5, is a quadrotor design from the University of Michigan's MAAV team (Michigan Autonomous Aerial Vehicles):Video: MAAVRanked second with a rating of 3.45, and my personal favorite, is the National University of Singapore's ball-shaped, ground-mobile, coaxial-rotor GremLion:Video: NUS Following up behind are a ducted-prop tailsitter with clip-on wings from the Cooper Unmanned Development Team (Cooper is a college in New York); a fan-in-wing-and-tail design from Icarus Labs, a group of MIT engineers; and a quad-tiltotor concept (with retractable perching arm) from Singapore's Nanyang Technological University. You can see the videos and their rankings at UAVforge.net.The next milestone in DARPA's UAVforge competition is the posting of proof-of-flight videos of the UAVs, with another round of voting planned for December. The winners of the UAVforge fly-off competition (see previous Ares post) will have 15 examples of their design manufactured for use in a military exercise later in 2012.
Tags: ar99, unmanned, DARPA