SBIR-STTR Award

A platform agnostic, Manned / Unmanned (MUM) Vehicle Management System (VMS) / autopilot for powered parafoils will greatly enhance their utility and provide important new capabilities. This will enable expansion of the utility applications of powered parafoils with important implications for military, commercial and civil applications. Powered parafoils excel because of their extreme low cost, portability, and low-signature potentials. These attributes lend themselves to a variety of SOF mission sets including infiltration / exfiltration, personnel recovery, ISR, and CASEVAC. This capability will also be of important benefit to cargo deliveries. The addition of MUM capability will increase the options for their deployment and facilitate their operation by non-pilot personnel. In Multi-Domain, Anti Access/ Area Denied (A2/AD) environments featuring contested airspace and near peer adversaries aerial delivery of supplies puts transport aircraft and crews at high risk of detection and interdiction. Powered parafoils have the potential to vastly improve the range of aerial delivery and offsets could be extended to 500 km or more. Powered parafoils also have the potential to enable aerial delivery of cargos after being ground or ship launched under their own power, in addition to their ability to deploy from transport aircraft. Their low cost to purchase and operate is attractive and so is their potential to free up transport aircraft for more critical missions. In addition to their military applicability MUM powered parafoils have numerous civil and commercial application potentials. Delivery of Humanitarian Aid / Disaster Relief (HA/DR) supplies is a good fit for MUM powered parafoils and has the potential to save many lives. As a low-cost, long-endurance remote sensor platform MUM powered parafoils have potential for border patrol, wildlife survey, scientific research and providing tools and equipment to remote industrial and mining operations. This research and development project will deliver a platform agnostic capability for powered parafoils that will be adaptable to a variety of vehicle sizes and configurations. This will lead to a broad potential for applications and will enable an international market for the new capability. In many markets the economics of powered parafoil cargo deliveries will make it the only practical and affordable means of getting essential supplies to difficult to reach places. The MUM capability will mean that aerial deliveries can be made without putting human life at risk and expand the overall potential. This proposal is forwarded by a team with expertise in powered parafoil, vehicle management systems, and military systems development. They are well positioned and highly qualified to accomplish the technical aspects of the program and progress it to an SBIR Phase III and commercial applications on a broad basis.

Powered parafoils have numerous advantages over competing platforms including their low-cost, high payload capacity, ease of use, and long-range capabilities. Current platforms are limited by the lack of a dedicated vehicle management system designed around the demands of powered parafoil flight. Paragrine Systems proposes the development of a Powered Parafoil Vehicle Management System (PP-VMS) that will significantly increase the utility of powered parafoil mobility platforms through a system that is easy to use, low-cost, and reliable. This project proposes an essential innovation: the integration of existing hardware and software technologies from unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and the Autonomous Guidance Unit (AGUs) used in Joint Precision Aerial Delivery Systems (JPADS) into a vehicle management system that will enhance and expand the utility of a variety of powered parafoil missions and platforms. Current guided parachute delivery systems, like JPADS, do not have the capability to control engine power/thrust, an essential feature for powered parafoils, the addition of which will enable far greater landing accuracy as descent rates will be able to be controlled and go-arounds will be made possible. Furthermore, JPADS guidance systems are also not configured for long-distance navigation, equipped with ground proximity sensing to facilitate better-timing for landing flares. Addition of PP-VMS capability will enable more precise, longer range cargo delivery as well as adapt powered parafoils for other missions such as ISR, weapons delivery, and decreasing pilot workload on manned operations. This project will advance a PP-VMS that is usable on multiple powered parafoil platforms of vary sizes, weights, and manufactures. It will have mission programmability with waypoint following, loiter patterns, and autonomous path reversal. PP-VMS will also have enhanced ground proximity and obstacle avoidance features to facilitate improved landings and will be enabled for remotely piloted operations. The addition of PP-VMS to new and existing platforms is expected to deliver numerous benefits to both military and civilian end-users through its easy of use, low-cost, and reliability. The mission impact of this project on the Air Force and the Department of Defense will be to transform the battlefield mobility enabled by low cost powered parafoil technology with reduced training requirements and expanded mission capabilities. These improvements will improve Global Access, Precision Strike, PR capabilities, and increased offset resupply through delivery of tactically flexible platforms for delivery of medical teams and Support Equipment, and capability for Air Force PR and Special Operations Forces (SOF). PP-VMS will also reduce combat risk to transport aircraft and their crews by enabling offsets of several hundred miles from point of departure from the transport aircraft to point of delivery on the ground.