The British Royal Navy assembled a cheap drone with body and wings made using a 3D printer on its ship HMS Mersey, which performed a successful flight test on July 14.
The three-kilogramme craft with an airplane-style design was launched by a three-metre catapult and it autonomously flew between a few pre-programmed waypoints for five minutes before being piloted to a safe belly landing on a pebbly beach, the MIT Technology Review reported.
The British Royal Navy spearheaded the test to demonstrate how disposable drones could be printed onboard, can possibly cut costs and let a crew adapt quickly to a new mission, like after a natural disaster.
Geoff Hayward, UAV desk officer at the Maritime Warfare Centre, who is quoted in the article, says the team was initially unsure if a low-cost printed drone could handle rolling swell and windy conditions. But it did. “As far as we know, it was a world first,” he is quoted as saying.
The technology was developed in partnership with researchers and a 3D printing company, and could find its way into civilian and commercial use, says MIT Technology Review.
A camera onboard the printed drone captured its launch from a catapult on HMS Mersey’s gun deck. The propeller-driven drone called Sulsa was developed by aeronautical engineers at the UK’s University of Southampton and has a 1.5-metre-wingspan.
Sulsa is clipped together from four parts made by a printer that fuses together nylon powder with a laser. The craft’s hinged control surfaces like rudders and ailerons are made by the printer. A battery, control electronics, propeller, and motor are needed to complete the drone, and sensors like cameras and radar can also be added. The finished drone can fly at speeds of up to 100 miles an hour.
While the Sulsa can be printed for just a few thousand dollars, the downside is that it can fly for only 40 minutes. “But that is enough for missions such as responding to reports of piracy, where being able to easily check out a vessel from a distance of 10 miles or so is valuable”, Jim Scanlan, a professor at the University of Southampton, is quoted as saying in the article. The logic here is that even if someone is to shoot the drone, it is cheap to make a replacement.
Despite Sulsa’s successful flight, experts say that work remains to be done to prove that printing planes at sea passes the test of reality. Researchers at Southampton admitted that printing parts for a Sulsa takes hours, and existing printers would need to be modified so they could stay level at sea.
vasudevan@newindianexpress.com