ARIA – Enduring Atmospheric Platforms

Funding to develop low-cost, persistent, and autonomous atmospheric platforms.

The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) funds teams of scientists and engineers to pursue research at the edge of what is scientifically and technologically possible.

Sitting within the Scoping Our Planet opportunity space, Enduring Atmospheric Platforms is a £50 million R&D programme aiming to develop low-cost, persistent, and autonomous atmospheric platforms.

The overarching goal of this programme is to provide a path to low cost, regionally scalable, high performance infrastructure for advanced communications and enable the anticipated £13 trillion to £20 trillion annual economic benefits of AI. This will be achieved through seeking a technological approach, agnostic to solution, that can reliably suspend and power communications hardware at the right place in the sky. Success will be measured by a single, galvanising demonstration: the continuous delivery of 300 W of power to a payload at altitude for a full week, while maintaining line-of-sight contact to a fixed ground point.

ARIA will fund projects across three Technical Areas (TAs):

• TA1: Enabling Technologies: Focusing on game-changing technologies (eg, power beaming, high density energy storage, low-cost long-lifetime skins for airships) that are so impactful, their development makes achieving the programme’s goals comparatively easy.
• TA2: System Integration and Testing: Funding core system development, integration, and testing to achieve the primary performance metric, including developing techno-economic models for cost reduction.
• TA3: Deployment and communications architecture planning: A desktop exercise defining target product profiles, understanding the emerging capabilities of TA2, understanding potential customers’ and their needs, evaluating what communications and backhaul hardware could be deployed on the platforms to deliver a valuable service, understanding the challenges of integrating the hardware on the platforms, determining constellation sizes and deployment concepts, working out the economics of operations, and understanding legal and regulatory path for market translation.