UF To Host First International Flyoff For High-Tech Tiny Airplanes

March 27, 1997

GAINESVILLE — On a barren, smoky battlefield of the future, a soldier leading his platoon stops and pulls from his rucksack an airplane roughly the size of sparrow.

He clicks a switch that starts the tiny craft’s stubby wings flapping rapidly, sends the plane aloft and watches it disappear behind a rise about a mile ahead. Within minutes, images from a video camera aboard the plane pop up on the soldier’s laptop screen: Scores of enemy soldiers lie in wait just over the hill.

That scenario is just one possible spinoff of the Micro-Aerial Vehicle Flyoff, a first-of-its-kind competition scheduled to begin at 8 a.m. April 5 on a grassy field near Archer, about 15 miles southwest of Gainesville. Planes the size of small birds and even insects have been built, but the competition targets craft that can take pictures and transmit them.

The contest will be hosted by the University of Florida’s Department of Aerospace Engineering, Mechanics and Engineering Science. Serving as judges will be representatives from the State University of New York at Buffalo, the Naval Research Laboratory and NASA’s Langley Research Center.

The flyoff is sponsored by the International Society of Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization (ISSMO). The goal is to see who can make the smallest airplane that can complete the mission: to fly roughly half a mile from the starting point, take video pictures of a hidden target and send those images back to the controller and judges.

So far, the contest has five entries: UF, the University of California at Santa Barbara, Mississippi State University, the Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy, and an individual, Steve Morris, from Palo Alto, Calif. The Naval Research Laboratory also will have a noncompeting entry.

Most of the work on micro-aerial vehicles has been done by the military during the past two years. While the technology is relatively new, possibilities for it are gaining momentum quickly.

“I’ve heard that even the CIA is interested,” said David Jenkins, an associate engineer with UF’s aerospace engineering department who helped hatch the contest idea with Raphael Haftka, a UF aerospace engineering professor. Jenkins is leading a team of UF students that will compete.

“I expect the winning entry will have a wingspan of about a foot and a half,” said Jenkins.

That’s about the size of the plane Jenkins and his team have built. Its fully loaded weight, including a small internal-combustion engine, fuel, camera and batteries, is about 10 ounces. Empty, it weighs about 4 ounces — roughly the same as a pocket calculator.

Ideally, micro-planes would be expendable, costing less than $2,000 each, a pittance compared with a typical multi-million-dollar, full-size manned aircraft. Civilian uses could include sending the tiny planes into places such as a smoke-filled building or around a hurricane-leveled city looking for survivors, said Haftka, ISSMO president.

Designing such small airplanes creates unique challenges, said Jenkins, who also is a radio-controlled model airplane enthusiast. The smaller an airplane is, he said, the harder it is for it to overcome the force of aerodynamic drag.

“It’s like a bug trying to swim in syrup,” said Jenkins. “When the wingspan gets to be about a foot or less, it gets pretty hard” to make a design work.

Jenkins’ team’s plane is made mostly of basswood and balsa covered with polyester film, which makes it fragile during casual handling. But because of their lightness, micro-planes actually are tougher than full-size aircraft because they can survive a crash the way a squirrel survives a fall from a tree without injury.

That lightness and small size also mean propulsion systems once thought unworkable are being reconsidered.

“Now that we are developing micro airplanes the size of small birds,” Haftka said, “flapping should be examined afresh, and this is one of the directions we are undertaking here at UF.”