 Researchers from the U.S. Army, Research Laboratory and Bell met in June to further advance the development of a micro unmanned aerial system or UAS. The UAS is a miniature lightweight reconnaissance vehicle that soldiers can carry on to the battlefield and deploy in a confined space. Bell attended ARL's open campus open house event in fall 2016. Approximately a year and a half later they signed a five-year collaborative research and development agreement or CRETA. The CRETA lets us work together and in this particular week we've invited Bell researchers here to ARL to perform experiments in the wind tunnel here at VTD and we're trying to get data on the fundamental level to build up their knowledge base of vehicles of this scale because their expertise is in designing the vehicles whereas our expertise is in the fundamentals of Bell engineers Levi Hefner and Dakota Easley recently visited ARL to use its wind tunnel to perform experiments on the micro UAS. The visit was prompted by vehicle control challenges Bell researchers observed in early flight testing. With the help of ARL scientists and equipment Bell engineers were able to identify those challenges and improve the performance of the aerial vehicle. So far the joint effort to improve the UAS has been largely successful. The two parties worked effectively together by taking advantage of their perspective strengths to manage different aspects of the development process. So this collaboration is great for Bell because we're heading into a new design space with these vehicles that we're not experienced in. ARL has the resources and expertise to help us out and together we can build a better vehicle than either of us could build alone. Dr. Jared Riddick said the main mission of this partnership is to combine the resources of both establishments to develop technologies to protect the soldiers. I am very excited about this collaboration with Bell and having researchers like Dakota and Levi working side by side with researchers here at APG really is a part of a strategy and that strategy is to engage industry partners early in the discovery phase so as we within ARL and academic partners work toward long term objectives of basic and unified research. Those exceptional pieces of technology that emerge can be spun out quickly to industry and therefore make it to the hands of the warfighter faster. The relationship between ARL and Bell is one of the many collaborations with industry and academia. The benefit of this collaboration is to bring advanced technologies and capabilities to the warfighters of tomorrow.