Hi Rob,

This looks like a competition for professional teams to me. A recent story said that 6 teams had received funding from the UK Ministry of Defence and 8 more were entering with private funding. Some of these are:


- Barnard Microsystems which will use an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV ) it has designed to survey oil pipelines in remote areas.

-Team Dragonfly, a privately funded group has proposed a 2m-long, lightweight, hovering vehicle equipped with a zoom lens and with thermal or infrared imaging.

-Team Stellar has proposed a multiple vehicle approach consisting of two different UAVs and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV).

-Swarm Systems proposes eight to 10 dinner-plate sized quad-rotor helicopters which would be able to fly in and out of buildings.

The winner will not necessarily be the team that identifies all of the targets correctly because a remote-controlled vehicle will lose points for needing input from a human operator.

Something that is completely autonomous - you just launch it; it goes off, does its own thing and comes back and says unequivocally X, Y and Z are targets - would score maximum points, say the organisers.

The winner gets a trophy and funding to develop their machine(s). Looks like a big money professional effort to me.