DARPA’s Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA) program is advancing autonomy to aid military operations in dense urban areas or heavily wooded forests

“The goal of Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA)  is to develop advanced algorithms to allow unmanned air or ground vehicles to operate without the guidance of a human tele-operator, GPS, or any datalinks going to or coming from the vehicle,” said JC Ledé, the DARPA FLA program manager. Autonomous flight capabilities are being developed and demonstrated using custom payloads on a commercial quadrotor platform (DJI Flamewheel 450 airframe, E600 motors with 12″ propellers, and 3DR Pixhawk autopilot).

A traditional approach to operating small UAVs uses a human operator as the pilot. The air vehicles are typically remotely controlled with the operator watching the vehicle or teleoperated with the operator watching data from on-board sensors. These techniques work only when a highly skilled operator is coupled with a communications channel having high availability and manageable latency. However, the approach breaks down when obstacles are added to the environment, as communications degrade, and as vehicle speed increases.