The announcement by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) it's awarded $5.2 million to two U.S. firms to develop aerial cargo drones that "vaporize" after delivering supplies confirms the agency has taken the giant leap from developing "transient electronics" into the new realm of "transient weapons."

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DARPA's transient technology was initially developed under an aptly named DARPA program called VAPR for "Vanishing Programmable Resources." This program seeks electronic systems capable of physically disappearing in a controlled, triggerable manner.

"These transient electronics should have performance comparable to commercial-off-the-shelf electronics, but with limited device persistence that can be programmed, adjusted in real-time, triggered, and/or be sensitive to the deployment environment," said DARPA.

VAPR aims to enable transient electronics as a deployable technology in the battlefield. Examples of these transient electronic devices are large-area distributed networks of sensors that decompose into the ground on command.

Operational VAPR systems mean the U.S. military won't have to worry about leaving electronic devices on the battlefield that could lead to the "compromise of intellectual property and technological advantage." That means the U.S. military's electronic devices can't be used against it or reverse engineered by its adversaries.

It was DARPA funding that pushed forward the initial research into transient electronics. This new class of electronics was first broached in 2012 by researchers from Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Tufts University.

A VAPR spin-off project named ICARUS or the "Inbound, Controlled, Air-Releasable, Unrecoverable Systems" has now taken the leap from transient electronics to transient weapons. The first transient weapon DARPA's examining are "vanishing cargo drones" that self-destruct after doing their jobs.

DARPA expects to have real world prototypes of its vanishing drones in the next two years. Each of these drones should be able to deliver three pounds of cargo within 30 feet of a target location. They then vaporize.

DARPA recently awarded a $2.9 million contract to build these vaporizing drones to DZYNE Technologies and $2.3 million to Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The contracts are part of ICARUS.

"With the progress made in VAPR, it became plausible to imagine building larger, more robust structures using these materials for an even wider array of applications," said VAPR program manager Troy Olsson.

"And that led to the question, 'What sorts of things would be even more useful if they disappeared right after we used them?' In discussions with colleagues, we were able to identify a capability gap that we decided was worth trying to close."

"Vanishing delivery vehicles could extend military and civilian operational capabilities in extenuating circumstances where currently there is no means to provide additional support," said Olsson.

TagsDARPA, U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, VAPR, Vanishing Programmable Resources, transient electronics, transient weapons