 The U.S. Army Research Laboratory and its partners in academia and industry hope to solve the most difficult challenges in unmanned aviation as officials unveiled the Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Propulsion or CUP April 2, 2018 at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. This is a real historic opportunity for VTD to showcase one of the rich research areas to ARL for all of you from ARL who are here and also the key Army stakeholders. The partnership holds the potential to position the Army to be a leader in UAS propulsion. The Center will enable the development of future technologies to support the Army's modernization priorities and the lab's essential research areas. Future vertical lift, ARL will clearly be supporting it in a number of ways but really focusing on spinning out what knowledge and understanding we can in the near term to help the CFTs across functional teams get where they need to go and delivering capability for soldiers. Increasing the performance of unmanned aircraft will lead to improvements in fuel efficiency, noise reduction, increased range and higher payloads. Unmanned aircraft such as the gray eagle, shadow and hunter stand to benefit initially but as the relationship matures, Center officials hope to improve smaller UAS as well. Center founder Dr. Mike Kwan who also serves as the lab's propulsion division chief said having all the collaborators under one umbrella will help develop specific technologies. I'm very pleased to start the Center for UAS Propulsion because this is a very important area. So any vehicles area around cannot move without the power. So we need to understand the importance power. So we are so proud to start, innovate and develop the new proportion of technologies for the unmanned aircraft systems. From Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, David McNally, ARL TV.