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Flimmer: The Flying, Swimming Drone

Dan Edwards of the U.S. Navy Research Laboratory is the principle investigator of Flimmer - a flying, swimming unmanned air vehicle (UAV)/unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV). Flimmer can operate in the air and underwater to significantly improve tactical availability of UUVs in time-critical situations. The concept could have wide-ranging uses, from intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) to lethal strike capabilities, to simple information gathering. "Flimmer would be delivering sensors for measuring either environmental parameters, looking for chemicals in the water. Flimmer could look for oil spills and try to find the source of, say, the Gulf coast leak," says Edwards.

Topics:
Aerospace Automation Defense Motion Control Robotics Unmanned Air Vehicles/Systems (UAV/UAS) Unmanned Underwater and Surface Vehicles (UUW/USV)

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    Transcript

    00:00:04 [Applause] [Music] out ofthe boox thinking inspired by nature takes uavs to new depths Dan Edwards of the Naval Research laboratory's vehicle research section and Technical electronic warfare is the principal investigator of flimmer a flying swimming UAV uuv NRL is merging two separate research areas

    00:00:30 unmanned undersea vehicles uuvs and unmanned air vehicles uavs to significantly improve tactical availability of uuvs In Time critical situations the Navy is looking for Unique solutions for imp placing sensors um for getting data in hard to- reach locations and flimmer is just one idea out of many that um holds promise flimmer is a combination airplane

    00:00:57 submarine uh in this case it starts as an airplane flies around and then splashes down in the water submerges and then swims underwater Birds splash down and swim for fish so there is precedent in nature um we're just trying to adapt it for uh UAV / uuv uses we're trying to solve several problems uh including the configuration design where do we put

    00:01:23 fins for underwater propulsion uh in order not to mess up the aerodynamics and underwater figuring out where to put the wings so we don't mess up the hydrodynamics uh flimmer would be delivering uh sensors for measuring uh either environmental parameters looking for chemicals in the water um flimmer could look for uh oil spills and try to find the source of say the Gulf Coast uh

    00:01:48 leak we have other projects where we have underwater launch of an airplane flimmer is the opposite it's an Airborne flight into underwater and it really is a game Cher in delivery of the underwater systems we're working through issues like any research that's uh very far out of the box we're finding unknown issues to solve and that's what we're here for is to solve the hard tough

    00:02:11 issues that no one has ever thought of NRL science solving the challenges of tomorrow