AROD Airborne Remotely Operated Device (1982-1988) The Airborne Remotely Operated Device (AROD) was a small ducted fan vertical-take-off-and-landing (VTOL) air vehicle that could easily translate through the air and provide short range aerial surveillance. The AROD project was initiated at the Hawaii detachment of SSC San Diego as part of the US Marine Corps Exploratory Development (6.2) Surveillance Program in the early 1980s, and was continued as part of the Ground Air Telerobotics Systems ( ...

A portable mission payload prototype package was developed by a team of SSC engineers and scientists, and an additional payload package was integrated onto the Cypher vehicle by Sikorsky and SSC engineers. In May 1996, the system was successfully demonstrated at the Military Police School at Ft. McClellan, AL, in a simulated counter-drug operation. The man-portable sensor package mounted on a ground vehicle-of-opportunity and the Cypher-mounted sensor package were operated simultaneously over th ...