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" Inspired by the winding flight of a falling maple seed, Lockheed Martin&amp;#039;s latest unmanned aerial vehicle concept, the Samarai Monocopter, doesn&amp;#039;t look intimidating. But Lockheed thinks it could become a powerful tool for soldiers in the field, a tiny flying machine they could take along with them.  The Samarai prototype is just 10 inches long, and Lockheed hopes to get it down to the size of a fingernail. The company revealed it to the world on Tuesday at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International&amp;#039;s Unmanned Systems Symposium in Washington, D.C. At just half a pound, it can take off vertically from a standstill, or take flight after someone tosses it into the air. Like a maple seed, the Samarai&amp;#039;s shape causes it to automatically rotate as it moves through the air, and that, along with its light weight, keeps it easily aloft. &amp;quot;We identified the maple seed as a very simple example of how evolution has refined the design over millions of years,&amp;quot; says Bill Borgia, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Lockheed Martin. &amp;quot;By applying some very simple concepts of power and a control surface to it, we were able to harness that and turn it into a working system.&amp;quot; Surveillance could be one key use for the Samarai, Borgia says\u2014imagine soldiers launching the device from nearly anywhere and seeing the video that mounted cameras stream back in real time.  &amp;quot;You can think of a situation where a solider would carry this around in a backpack in an urban environment where he needs to look inside a window or somewhere he can&amp;#039;t see,&amp;quot; Borgia says. &amp;quot;He can deploy this very quickly. It can operate in a confined space because it&amp;#039;s capable of vertical flight, so it can navigate to where the soldier wants to look and give him a birds-eye view of what he can&amp;#039;t see directly.&amp;quot;      Lockheed communications manager Stephen O&amp;#039;Neill says the trials on Tuesday went off without a hitch, with the pint-size UAV staying aloft for a few minutes on each flight. Still, the Samarai remains a proof-of-concept project. And it&amp;#039;s quite difficult to fly, given that the seed-inspired design includes just one rotor. &amp;quot;If you think for a minute about a helicopter, it has a two-rotor system, and if one of those blades fell off, what would happen to that helicopter?&amp;quot; O&amp;#039;Neill says. &amp;quot;Essentially we have the same device but with one airfoil, and it&amp;#039;s under complete control.&amp;quot; Though a single-blade approach presents a huge challenge, Borgia says this can be a good thing. &amp;quot;That challenge gives us tremendous knowledge about control systems in general,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Then we can take the knowledge and that technology and apply it to other applications in robotics.&amp;quot; What those specific applications are, however, Borgia cannot say. &amp;quot;Once we get robots into the hands of users, they&amp;#039;ll think of far more applications than we as engineers have ever been able to.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a6836/lockheed-martin-tests-tiny-samarai-uav/>