Unmanned Systems Technology 007 | UMEX 2016 report | Navya ARMA | Launch & recovery systems | AIE 225CS | AUVs | Electric motors | Lethal autonomous weapons

17 “The guy that started LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, has a definition of an entrepreneur as someone who jumps off a cliff and builds an aeroplane on the way down. You start off with very large leaps of faith and you might have to go back and join things up,” he says. “Some of the guys at Ascenta had worked on the early Zephyr [the record- breaking solar-powered endurance aircraft] programme, and they knew from that how we could develop Ascenta; there were gaps in the early days that we went back and filled. But a lot of people couldn’t get their heads around it – and the fact that three of us were drawing our pensions!” Innovation in engineering is a theme close to Gifford’s heart. “I was researching which age ranges are producing innovation, and if you make an analysis it’s amazing how often it’s a teenager or someone in their early 20s, and perhaps 10% of innovation is coming from people who haven’t left the education sector,” he says. Delivered by droid “The young people actually accept where the future is now – the whole way they see their lives going will rely on the Internet of Things [IoT], drones, AI and robotics. They are not going to go to the supermarket; they are going to send a droid or their own multicopter to pick up their deliveries.” That is what his latest project, Pouncer, will do – solve the delivery of food into disaster areas around the world more accurately than ever before, and with the right kind of food as well. The idea essentially comes from using a proximity wing, or ‘flying squirrel suit’, to fly aid into disaster areas. “An RAF officer came to see me and was looking for ways to deliver humanitarian aid into natural disaster areas with damaged infrastructure: he was looking for a small UAV that could do the equivalent of a Berlin airlift. He had an analysis for the cost of components and payload, and it was a lot of money for the airframe.” So Gifford thought about ways to do it differently. “I would build the whole thing out of food, and that’s where Pouncer began,” he says. “It uses the principle of thermal moulded plastic salad bowls made to the shape of the airframe holding the food, and all the spars are vacuum packed into a small space.” He found out from wingsuit flyers that starting out at 20,000 ft meant they travelled 12 miles, and that gave him confirmation of an 80 kg payload in a particular profile gliding for 12 miles. “If you want to increase the duration of the flight then you put a motor on it, and we would use a cardboard motor that runs on compressed air with a very simple guidance system and a simple low-altitude parachute landing mechanism,” he says. Importance of food Food, and food programmes, have been a key part of Gifford’s professional life. “In 1976 I wrote the feeding programme for an expedition to Mt Everest, then for a mother and son who rowed the Atlantic, for an SAS man crossing the Arctic from Russia to Canada, for Richard Branson’s Global Challenger, and I wrote the Royal Geographic Society’s catering manual, so I knew about how to make compressed food and vacuum-pack Nigel Gifford | In conversation Unmanned Systems Technology | April/May 2016 Once you join the dots up, you then have an innovative way of addressing something. Really I am a concept engineer A 3D-printed prototype of the Pouncer food delivery system