Heavy life challenge: Biology usually discriminates against heavy isotopes. Can we reverse, redirect, or exploit that tendency? Find a way to get plants and bacteria to preferentially incorporate heavy atomic isotopes.
Use microbes, algae, duckweed, or plant-cell cultures to produce deuterated and 13C/15N-labeled complex biomolecules that are expensive or impractical to synthesize chemically.
> Competitors must create an aircraft that is both lightweight and powerful – lifting at least 4x its weight while flying a 5-nautical-mile circuit course.
I'd make it 50NM. 5 is way too easy to bullshit with edge case engineering. Alternatively, set a minimum payload capacity of something like 100kg.
Maybe "edge case engineering" is precisely what they're looking for? Get people to think about beating the rules with cheesy strategies, in hopes some of those could, with some cleverness, scale up and evolve into proper, broad-range solution - or at least become a key previously-missing component of one. But even if it can't, very narrow capabilities can still be useful too; military isn't beyond doing silly things if they offer enough tactical advantage (enough to offset extra burden on logistics, at least).
The military is waking up to the need to adapt frontline logistics. With killrates of 90% for traditional trucks in the Ukraine war, without resupply missions by UAVs/UGVs holding positions is impossible now.
Also .. if that were the case russia would not find volunteers anymore, as the large majority of russian soldiers in Ukraine are there by free will, not because they were force drafted.
This is being announced to us or everyone right now? It's only around 10 weeks away: that seems surprisingly close. Have some folk already been made aware & have they had time to build for this DARPA Challenges? Generally I think of them as longer running challenges.
> Generally I think of them as longer running challenges.
Given how outlandish the ratio requirement is compared to currently available products I expect this one will be recurring for at least a few years similar to what happened with the self driving challenge 20ish years ago.
I saw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tohImHa4f5U (Hoarder Sam, "I'm building a drone for the DARPA lift challenge") the other day and it was a pretty good discussion of the "shape of the envelope" of the problem (and what kind of lift ratios actually exist in modern air vehicles), and particularly how they've set up the constraints to eliminate a bunch of "easy" approaches.
It also reminded me that for the first round of the self-driving grand challenge, none of the vehicles even completed the course :-) They really are trying to encourage "out of the box", or at least "not in the obvious box", designs...
Use microbes, algae, duckweed, or plant-cell cultures to produce deuterated and 13C/15N-labeled complex biomolecules that are expensive or impractical to synthesize chemically.
Could be fun, honestly.
Contact DARPA for a lift !
I'd make it 50NM. 5 is way too easy to bullshit with edge case engineering. Alternatively, set a minimum payload capacity of something like 100kg.
cc @dang
They don't. Life expectancy of a Russian on the front line is hours. You just send in another wave.
Edit, I forgot, most are not aware of that:
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-conscripts-war-combat...
Given how outlandish the ratio requirement is compared to currently available products I expect this one will be recurring for at least a few years similar to what happened with the self driving challenge 20ish years ago.
Possibly against laws of physics at energy density of 4x?
It also reminded me that for the first round of the self-driving grand challenge, none of the vehicles even completed the course :-) They really are trying to encourage "out of the box", or at least "not in the obvious box", designs...