DARPA came close to finding a drone that can lift four times its own weight

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) concluded its Lift Challenge last week, and although none of the participants achieved the desired goal of building a drone capable of lifting four times its weight, they came close. The agency announced that the company AVIDrone pushed the limits with its electric helicopter design that lifted an unprecedented payload-to-weight ratio of 3.84 to 1. In practical terms, that means the company’s Katana heavy-lift drone, weighing 29.3 pounds, lifted and carried a payload weight of 112.4 pounds across approximately five nautical miles. AVIDrone, a Canadian company with U.S. headquarters in Maryland, specializes in cargo delivery drones for the defense and commercial sectors. In a statement , the company called its first-place performance the “result of bringing together years of know-how, our proprietary autopilot and flight-control technologies, and decades of experience designing and flying aircraft specifically for heavy cargo lift.” With the DARPA Lift Challenge, the agency aimed to advance vertical lift in a small unmanned aerial system. Calling it the “heavy-lift bottleneck,” multirotor drones typically can only carry payloads equal to or less than their own weight. Phillip “Donna” Smith, the Lift Challenge program manager, described heavy vertical flight as the “next great technological inflection point that is economical for widespread adoption.” He explained that its application could revolutionize industries like agri…