For short stints this summer and fall, engineers at Northrop Grumman Corp. set aside their defense-contract work and took up a different fight.
Their objective was to save an ecosystem … and to keep an eye on polar bears.
Professionals who normally spend their days working on military aircraft took part in all-night hackathons, complete with pizza.
Some 17 teams responded to the challenge, including teams from Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC)’s Autonomous Design Center of Excellence in Rancho Bernardo. Each team tried to build the ultimate aircraft that could fly autonomously for a couple of hours, collect data on polar bears and habitat without annoying the creatures, and stand up to the nasty weather that the Arctic can dish out.
The odyssey that Northrop calls Wildlife Challenge began with Charlie Welch, an engineer specializing in energy, power and batteries.
Welch, who works at the Northrop office in Redondo Beach’s Space Park, said he had been thinking of contacting a wildlife research team about using unmanned aircraft to survey animals. His contacted the San Diego Zoo Global, he said, because of the organization’s scientific bent.
Zoo officials loved the idea.
Friendly Competition
Pretty soon, Northrop Grumman executives decided to make it a contest, and bring in engineering teams from other sites.
On a chilly morning in late October, top teams representing four Northrop Grumman offices assembled at a rural site in San Diego County to test their flying machines. They included airplane-style designs with wingspans of several feet.
Judging criteria included the noise that the aircraft gave off, according to Nicholas Pilford, postdoctoral associate in applied animal ecology with the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research.
Drones could not “hum like a lawn mower” and be successful, he said. The point, he said, is for the bear to naturally respond to its environment, not respond to a strange racket.
Of the eight San Diego teams that participated, BearArea51 made the cut to go to the finals. Andrea Johnson led the team, which chose electric propulsion over a gas engine to cut down on noise.
But there were trade-offs. A battery-powered craft can’t stay in the air as long, and while the team could add more lithium-ion polymer batteries to boost endurance, that would make the craft heavier — another problem that would force designers to carry a lighter payload.
The BearArea51 team optimized its aircraft for the job. It featured video streaming as well as a custom visual detection solution tailored to identify polar bears in video.
Ironically, the team from the office dedicated to unmanned systems didn’t get the nod. It was a group from Melbourne, Fla. — Northrop Grumman’s Manned Aircraft Design Center of Excellence — that put together the autonomous aircraft that was judged best.
Habitat Threats
With climate change, the Arctic is warming and the ice at the top of the world is melting. The situation has attracted the attention of military leaders and transportation companies. Both are mulling what increased shipping traffic and more people in the far north will mean.
Melting ice also means that polar bears are losing habitat.
At the same time, researchers need new technology to observe bears, Pilford said. An unmanned drone will be much less expensive than a manned helicopter — and have a smaller carbon footprint as well.
If all goes well, a new generation of unmanned research aircraft will take a series of pictures that researchers will be able to stitch together. Researchers will be able to trade low-resolution satellite pictures — where a single pixel represents 25 square miles — to very high-resolution imagery where pixels are measured in centimeters.
The winning team from Northrop Grumman plans to go to Churchill, Manitoba, on Canada’s Hudson Bay, soon to test out their aircraft in a cold environment. Welch gets to go, too; he’ll trade his Southern California autumn for a week where the temperature hovers below freezing.
Taking on the Cold
The group will test how the aircraft flies in the Arctic wind and how components — including the energy system — stand up to the cold. The team will also see how well the craft holds up without a sophisticated logistics chain supporting it. The design has to be rugged.
Part of the work is to convince Transport Canada — that country’s equivalent to the FAA — that unmanned systems can operate well in that circumstance. Once regulators agree that the drone can operate within the operator’s sight, the partners will seek to move beyond line of sight.
Churchill has a colony of polar bears.
“If we get some good bear information, I’ll consider that a bonus,” said the zoo’s Pilford.
Northrop Grumman has annual revenue of $23.5 billion. Its San Diego programs include the U.S. Air Force’s Global Hawk and a similar aircraft, the U.S. Navy’s Triton.
Global Hawk has a wingspan of 130 feet, weighs 32,000 lbs. with a full fuel tank, can fly as high as 60,000 feet (maybe higher) and can stay in the air for more than 32 hours.
