About six months ago I finished the design work on an essentially infinite duration* (solar powered) armed hover drone nicknamed LADES (Low Altitude Detection and Engagement System). It's small enough to compress into a backpack and is capable of being deployed from aircraft like the C-130. The drone is equipped with a weapon system which works roughly like a high powered sniper rifle, which makes it ideal for taking out specific targets without any collateral damage.
*theoretically infinite duration practically translates to a couple of weeks, after which you'd probably want to bring the thing in for maintenance, reloading, or repair.
LADES is also cheap and easy to manufacture, using entirely off the shelf commercial technology. If deployed en masse over a hard to reach area (or a not so hard to reach area, like a city) all of the camera feeds can be linked together to a central processing facility where facial recognition systems can look for specific individuals. Suspicious behavior can also be watched for by personnel sitting at video banks. If a high value target or obvious enemy/insurgent forces can be identified, the LADES weapons systems can be used to immediately engage said target even if they are in an area with large numbers of civilians/human shields where rocket and missile strikes would be costly in terms of collateral damage.
So far, I have been completely unable to get the military or government interested in this system or funding its development. The full cost of a demonstration prototype is $80,000 and about four weeks time, mostly due to shipping.
I have contacted, or attempted to contact the following groups or agencies regarding this, below I will list these groups and what their response was.
DARPA - I traded several emails with a program director who I met after a proposed rifle design I sent to DARPA's "mail us an idea" address got a very large amount of positive feedback. This program director indicated that while he thought the system had a lot of potential, it was far too developed and deployable to be funded by DARPA. He passed it on to the Pentagon and I never heard anything more from anyone on it. (I'm not listing the names or specific jobs of anyone because these were emails sent from one person/agency to another and I'm not positive on what the etiquette is on that, so the side of caution gets the err.)
TSWG - I sent several emails to different parts of this group and never received any reply.
The CIA - I attended a recruiting event at my former graduate school (KU) and after the event ended I gave the agents a description of the system and it's capabilities and asked them to pass it along. They agreed to, but cautioned that it wasn't their area and not to expect much. I have had no further contact.
Local Congressional People - I contacted the office of Emanual Cleaver (my Rep.) and after several weeks was presented with the address to the SBIR website.
Various Venture Capital firms - I have had absolutely no luck with this group at all, except for one person who told me after the Pentagon asked for prototypes of the rifle I designed, "Well, that sounds great, as soon as you get a contract, call me and we'll get you all the capital you need."
Local SBA and other local Entreprenurial sources - this generally yielded a lot of encouragement and a lot of re-iteration of things I had already learned in KU's MBA program.
Manufacturers of major component systems - after contacting the companies that made major components of the finished product, I was blown off in various and creative ways, including one that refused to even talk with my due to my lack of a corporate website.
Frankly, I'm about out of ideas on where to go with this. The LADES drone will save lives. It's cheap. It provides a desperately needed capability to the U.S. military. It's available now. And I cannot generate interest in it no matter what I try. Any and all ideas anyone has on resources I have not explored fully or new ways to explore resources I have already visited would be greatly welcomed. Thank you all for your time and help.
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Notes to prove I'm not a crazy person rambling on. My user name is my real name, anyone is more than welcome to google it. The rifle design referred to is something I came up with after my deployment in 03-04. Shortly after finishing grad school, I emailed a rough outline of the design to DARPA's open submission button. Two days later I was being asked for prototypes and testing data by the Pentagon's technology office and getting emails from General officers telling me that there was a lot of interest in this at Ft. Benning. When I explained that I wasn't an engineer and would need money to lead a team to do development work (preferably in concert with an existing manufacturer) on the design everyone pretty much quit talking to me.
I am not at all an engineer. My undergraduate work was in Justice Systems, with additional emphasis on statistical analysis and psychology, particularly profiling. My graduate work was originally in law - interrupted by deployment - and then in business, specifically entrepreneurship and international business. I have also been quoted by Time Magazine's Curious Capitalist blog about the financial crisis on multiple occasions. linky and linky as examples.
But like I said, I'm not an engineer, this drone system is much more of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup than a Maserati engine if that makes sense. I didn't invent any new radical technology to make this work, I just found a lot of different and sometimes obscure systems that can be integrated to meet a gaping need for the U.S. military and figured out how to put them together.
Again, thank you in advance for any and all help anyone is able to provide.
