Ramona Adams
Engineers from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory have visited two aviation companies in Philadelphia to explore opportunities for potential small business partnerships.
ARL engineers toured DPI UAV Systems and Piasecki Aircraft Corp. respectively run by Michael Piasecki and his brother John, the U.S. Army said Oct. 19.
Rajneesh Singh, a team lead at ARL’s vehicle technology directorate, said ARL wants to collaborate with small companies as part of the Open Campus initiative that aims to foster research and development partnerships between Army engineers and the academia, industry and government.
“By having face-to-face meetings, by seeing the hardware facilities that they have, by seeing some of the prototypes that they have, we got to learn, much better than would have been possible through phone discussions, or by reading published papers,” Singh said.
Singh noted the companies want to collaborate with ARL on opportunities and there could be a cooperative research and development agreement in the future.
DPI UAV Systems builds rotary wing unmanned aerial vehicles for military and commercial applications.
Piasecki currently develops a prototype of the Aerial Reconfigurable Embedded System for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to provide an unmanned vertical takeoff and landing flight module that will work to transport various payloads, the Army noted.
