UAV round-upAurora Flight Sciences to develop disposable sensor taggants

The famous theme music to the James Bond film “Goldeneye” includes the line: “You’ll never know how I watched you from the shadows as a child.” Those who have bought the GoldenEye 80 UAV from Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Aurora Flight Sciences can appreciate the sentiment, knowing as they do that the craft is specially designed for sensitive reconnaisance and target identification missions. Consider the Navy among these ranks of admirers: Aurora announced last week that it had won a Navy Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to develop a low-cost degradable taggant that could be dispersed via the GoldenEye to note suspicious activity in particular areas, especially as a means of defeating IEDs.

Partnering with Aurora on the project is Professor Christopher Lambert of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In addition to developing the degradable taggant itself, the team will also develop a conceptual design for the sensor system itself, which hopefully will be able to detect nearby changes that are characteristic of IED emplacement or other asymmetric threat activities. “This passive taggant,” the company says, “will enable nearly real-time change detection within the treated area using simple optical sensing techniques.” Aurora intends to investigate a variety of approaches for dispersing the taggant, such as hand-held devices and from manned and unmanned vehicles. Not that they will have much time to put all these elements in order. Due to high demand in Iraq, Aurora intends to rush development, with a system available in as little as eighteen months.