Darpa Readies UCAR Downselect

Published: Sep 06, 2004
Source: www.aviationnow.com



Developers of the Unmanned Combat Armed Rotorcraft (UCAR) have demonstrated critical technologies needed to realize their vision for an autonomous battlefield scout and attack helicopter, but uncertainty still lingers over the project's future.

The goal of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa)-led initiative is essentially to devise a system that could independently find targets, even armed individuals, and attack them, with human controllers providing only the most basic instructions. At the same time, the price for each stealthy unmanned helicopter is supposed to be no more than $8 million, with support costs a fraction of a comparable manned system like the AH-64 Apache.

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