 Army researchers teamed with the U.S. Marine Corps to fly and test 3D-printed quadcopters at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in 29 Palms, California in May. As part of an ongoing DOD warfighter incentive lab fund program, the integrated training exercise allowed the researchers to test their equipment and to prove their capabilities. At the Army Research Laboratory, our goal is to develop technology to make the warfighter more effective. And the best way to do that is to evaluate things that we're working on in a relevant environment. We can try our best to develop things in a lab setting, but once you come out to the real world and participate in an exercise like this, you're able to learn all kinds of different problems that can arise and deal with them in a strategic and rapid way. The researchers participated in the exercise that consisted of several urban operations in a mock Afghan environment. By participating in this exercise, we're learning what our technology can do to make them more effective. We're finding out where we need to focus our effort and develop things. We're finding out what problems Marines are facing. We're finding out the challenges that exist in the modern battlefield. And we can use that information to go back to the lab and work harder to make their lives easier. During the operations, the lab's unmanned aircraft systems were used by the opposition force to use against the expeditionary force. Since we've arrived here, we've come up with all kinds of different challenges. Sometimes for example, the equipment that you're using can conflict with other people in the battlefield. So there's been all kinds of issues with comms links, we've had intermittent connections with say our video systems, with our radio links, and that's a problem that's relevant. So there's going to be other players in the battlefield and they may shut down your links and you have to come up with a way to adapt to that. Army researchers were embedded with sailors and Marines to help them operate the equipment, ask about their user experience, and they observed how they use the systems. In addition, we've had all kinds of challenges related to the hardware that we're testing. So after you fly in sort of rugged terrain, people are banging things around in their pack, moving it to different sites. Things can come loose, wear out, you need to rapidly respond to that and replace parts and make sure that your equipment is operational and safe. The collaboration between the war fighters and researchers pushes the boundaries of science and technology, giving the fighting forces the decisive edge needed to defeat their adversaries and provides strategic direction of shaping and equipping future forces. We've been working on 3D printed quadcopters for about three or four years now and in that time span, we've got all sorts of useful feedback. Just for example, we were told based on one of our early designs that there was too much hardware, so nuts and bolts and screws, and if you say fall and drop a bunch of those parts, you're never going to find them, so the aircraft would just be abandoned and the user would move on. So in response to that, we tried to leverage 3D printing and make all the parts kind of snap together like Legos. The side benefit of that is that your assembly time drops from about two hours to maybe 15 or 20 minutes. Another lesson learned was to make the system really easy to use. So it used to take several hours to learn how to fly one of these vehicles and with a lot of different changes to the flight controller and the way that the operator training goes and how the vehicle actually behaves to user inputs, it now takes maybe a minute or two to learn how to fly. The goal is to get these 3D printed quadcopters to the field to support the nation's war fighters. One thing I'm really excited about in this experiment is the cross force collaboration between the Marines and the Army. Soldiers and Marines face similar challenges in the battlefield and sometimes it makes a lot of sense to work together. So in this exercise, by bringing together my team from Army Research Lab and all of the Marines that have done such a good job organizing this ITX, we've been able to really cross communicate with each other and understand each other's problems. And by doing that, we can find common ground and leverage that common ground as we work on our science and technology solutions to make soldiers and Marines' lives easier. That helps everybody involved.