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Mechanical Butterflies?
MImeKillEr writes "According to an article on BBC News, two researchers from Oxford took highspeed photographs of an Admiral butterfly in a specially-designed windtunnel to study how butterflies fly. The resulting research brings insight into small-scale flight dynamics. Although the article doesn't give an ETA on this, they expect to be able to build an aircraft with a 10cm wingspan that will be either autonomous or radio controlled. This will allow them to be used in rescue missions, cave exploration and possibly even on Mars."
If you could put cameras on these things they would be great for espionage. I imagine the military would love to see some tiny radio controlled flying vehicles with video capture capability.
you can take the road that takes you to the stars...
I feel proud to know my taxes are once again being spent on something useful... I notice they used smoke to spot the airflow, I hope the butterflies were consulted first on breathing 2nd hand smoke or we could be in for some costly litigation in a few years time!
Windows guys please stop pissing on everyone and the Linux guys stop pissing in the wind, hoping to hit Windows guys!
...if the MSN marketroids ever got their hands on this technology...arrgh the butterflies...they're everywhere...
Ceci n'est pas une
funniest thing I saw
but really hard to fly : planes with flapping wings
this technology is today where fixed wing tech war one century ago (ie a few hundred meters flight at 2 or 3 meters altitude)
www.ornithopter.net/
and possibly, terrorism. and possibly Big Brother's lil Helpers, and possibly a pest to native birds who try to eat them.
What a world we live in!
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
We are planning to send a fleet of mechanical butterflies to mars...
Good morning slashdot!
I can own my own Thropter ... Arrakis here i come !
Although the west assures the world that butterfly aircraft will be used for exploritory purposes, iraq believes that the butterflies will be used for offensive purposes...
They have responded by ordering several large nets.
.Got to get facts straightened out.
on a side note. Lets attack Mars.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
The cool thing about digital photography is that all you really have to do is a flyby. You can stop, zoom, and process the captured video images afterwards.
Also, all this thing has to do is broadcast a live video transmission. Recording it can be done remotely, so you don't have to worry about either recovering the device, or taking up weight with memory or recording media. Simply fly in as far as the power source will allow then either recover the device later or hope the images you have are worth the cost of losing it.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Oh, right, the military! This is exactly what I thought when I read about "tiny radio controlled flying vehicles with video capture capability." I surely can't see any better uses for them. (Who said I do?!)
root@aio:~# nmap -sX -iR -p1- # Ho, ho, ho! Merry Xmas, everyone!
In the atmosphere of Mars, the are only 1.5% the molecules we have. The composition is also evry different, but the point is: it's _very_ thin. OTOH, the gravity on Mars is about 38% of Earth's gravity.
So if you have something that flies on Earth, it's still a long way to go until you get it to fly on Mars.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
Something about you feeling real good about mechanical butterflies just warms my heart right now. Merry Christmas.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
...a world where MSN did this, and geeks rushed to become mechanical Lepidoptera experts, running around with nets trying to catch these things and hack them (load linux, perhaps?) for their own use. I can imagine MSN suddenly thinking this was not such a bright idea...
> The butterfly has had hundreds of
> millions of years to develop it's
> flight model.
So what? The lotus flower had at least as much time to develop its self-cleaning petals, but it took human scientists just a few years to develop an agent that gives any glass surface the same property just by spraying it on. It forms the same nano structures that make water drops, which take every trace of dust and dirt with them, flow off completely, or even drops of super glue.
> It's about the finely tuned control
> mechanisim (in this case, butterfly brain)
Oh look, behold the mighty powers of the butterfly brain, which is about as intelligent as my cheapo Casio watch. I don't see much problems with emulating this. By the way, most of the 'knowledge' about flying isn't in that tiny butterfly brain anyway, it's hardwired into the nervous system. The wings flap so fast that the delay of sending impulses all the way to the brain and back all the time would be too big.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
Did anyone else, while reading "Admiral butterfly," imagine Steve Ballmer in MSN butterfly suit dancing on the stage? My God, this is not a nice thing to imagine while reading about technology, which can be a voyeurism breakthrough...
root@aio:~# nmap -sX -iR -p1- # Ho, ho, ho! Merry Xmas, everyone!
Ok, to clarifly; I think this problem, or almost any other AI problem, _can_ be solved by this aproach, just not in a efficient way (like NP hard kind of efficient ) Intelligent behaviour arises directly out of the relationships of parts, not out of any real ability of the parts.
You say your watch is about as smart as a butterfly. Let's see it fly to Mexico and get laid.
In the end, I think you might just be able to get a Casio watch to pilot a butterfly, but it's going to take a lot more insight than some high speed photographs.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
So is anyone else here in the States concerned that there might be a growing gap in clap and fling technology?
Inventor of the LOLbalrog meme.
Remembering the chaos theory description of the wide reaching potential of tiny effects:
:-)
Do we now have robotic weather control ?
If you're thinking about writing algorithms (if-then-else-style) that emulate a butterfly's behaviour down to every wing-movement and fitting them into a tiny microchip: yes, that would be _very_ hard.
Of course you can't actually achieve anything with wrist-watch technology; however, there are alternatives: Self-learning algorithms, neural networks, genetic algorithms, etc. There was that
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
Send a massive swarm out that all broadcast back small pieces of the scene from different angles. All of the physical location data is combined with the video, a computer back at "base" assembles it all into a 3D VR world.
Then you as a participant ("butterfly tamer" ?)could control the swarm, and as you moved through VR space, the butterflies would move through physical space to try to build up the detail of image necessary for what you're looking at.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
When things develop through evolution it tends to be by a series of small changes, each representing no improvement or a small improvement. This means that although evolution over a long time tends towards a working solution, it doesn't always tend to the best (most efficient) solution. The structure of your eye is a case in point - the blood supply lies in front of the light sensitive cells of the retina.
What may be useful is that the process can find non-intuitive solutions to problems and there is a built in robustness to what emerges. Random variation has to have a wider tightrope to walk or any deviation from the norm would be fatal. Complex evolved systems also tend to have a built in redundancy as they grow out of similar and simpler systems which become interrelated.
Slashdotters may remember a report a year or so old about an evolving robot which developed dragonfly-like flight. Why take a pattern found in nature (photographic the butterfly) and try to work out how it works when you can evolve it directly with a learning system? If you're going to ape evolved systems it seems much more sensible (and easier) to me to ape the process rather than the result.
from Dune.
Again, reality imitates (science) fiction. Nice!
Sigged!
that I know of is this guy, the L'il Skeeter.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Sounds cool! Presumably the longer a swarm stays in one place, the better your resolution is likely to get....
F lockin g/FlockingIndex.htm
t ml
Links to AI flocking behaviour resources which might be of interest....
Oxford Uni:
http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/~sumpter/
Craig Reynolds (early boid work):
http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/
Manchester Uni:
http://www.eng.man.ac.uk/Aero/wjc/Research/
US Airforce:
http://www.vs.afrl.af.mil/News/99-23.h
We can produce land vehicles than can travel across continents without refuelling. No animal can do this.
We can produce aeroplanes that will fly around the world without refuelling. No bird can do this.
I see no fundamental reason why we can't produce a mechanical butterfly that can operate for days without refuelling as real butterflies can achieve this. If you are really small then the energy required to keep you aloft is really small also. I've absolutely no idea how much energy a butterfly requires to keep it in the air for a day but my guess would be that it is considerably less than that contained in one drop of petrol.
wot no sig
Actually, Tom Swift (I'm pretty sure it was Tom Swift) did it, about 2 decades ago. Except it was a tiny robotic dragonfly. Nominally good Sci-Fi, creating a new technology and then exploring the implications of it. Can't remember the title of the book but I'm sure some other geekly folks here also read the story.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Have you watched a butterfly flitter? I think I'd puke if I had to watch that looking for significant frames.
Never confuse volume with power.
How are we going to deploy these things on Mars? Surely, it would take about 500 years for one to fly there (assuming it could store enough fuel of some type). Until we can land a probe, I'll assume this to be the method of transit. ;)
-- jimmycarter
Ooh! It'd be neat to combine it with that slug-eating robot techology that was discussed here some months ago. An army of slug-eating robotic butterflys would be hella-cool!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
They'll just get swallowed up by some larger company.
Probably one that makes mechanized predatory birds.
Okay, so my question is how one could possibly power a mechanical butterfly. Living butterflies subsist on nectar; it's high energy, but they still need a massive daily intake. So, it seems like powering a butterfly would require a super-light-weight battery with long life and high output. Photovoltaic wings might work, but then it couldn't fly at night. Any thoughts on other sources of power? Superconducting monofilament extension cords?
And incidentally, the article says that insect wings get 10 times as much lift as airfoils. Presumably, that's for airfoils moving at the speed of insects. Has anyone found a way to test this with a butterfly moving the speed of a jet plane? I'm curious if the proportion holds true at all speeds, or if the ratio collapses as speed increases.
You're saying human scientists were able to do that a few years after we speciated from whatever our direct ancestor was? Wow, I missed that.
No, really, I understand -- you're saying it won't necessarily take forever, now we've thought of it, to mimic butterfly flight. Maybe.
But go take a look and see how long submarine designers have been trying to mimic the agility (and specifically, lack of drag) of dolphins in the water. Or watch the way a sparrow uses stall speed when it lands on a tree branch outside your office window. Ain't necessarily all that easy. We can't make robots that run around like a five-year-old can, and that's a mode of locomotion we know pretty well, right?
I have liatris aspera plants in my front priarie garden -- a monarch magnet -- and sometimes in August there are maybe eight butterflies dogfighting for position out there. They aren't sluggish in flight, not at all. Maybe you haven't watched a buttefly lately?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
RC in caves is a ludicrous concept, save for line of sight, but then, why bother. Cave radios work with really looooowwwwww frequencies and require rather large coil antennas to transmit through all that rock. Cave radios are pretty finicky too. This is why cave rescue organizations (good ones) have the ability to lay a mile or two of phone wire in really horrible conditions.
RC butterflies or RC anything-else just ain't gonna happen in a cave.
A few people have suggested the military applications for these robotic butterflies, particularly in the area of espionage. The problem is this: butterflies make terrible spies, because everyone notices them!
How many times have you heard someone say, "look at the pretty horsefly on the windowsill"? Eh, never right? But we notice butterflies, because they are beautiful and elegant. In fact, of all of the insects around, I'd say butterflies are the ones most likely to be noticed, picked up, and examined because they are colorful and generally harmless. Well, that's probably the last thing you want, someone picking up your robot spy. "Hey, this butterfly has a resistor soldered to it's back..."
So the idea of making a robotic butterfly spy is probably not workable. Maybe a robotic cockroach spy..? Never mind, they'd just get stomped on sight. That might just be the real problem, trying to find an insect that wouldn't provoke interest, either positive or negative.
One of the ideas kicked around for the 1992 "Godzilla vs. Mothra" was killing off Mothra, and resurrecting her as a dragonfly mecha. The dragonfly Mothra did actually appear in "Rebirth of Mothra 2" as Aqua Mothra. And while the mecha has never appeared on screen, Armored Mothra appeared in "Mothra 3", with sword blades on the forward edges of her wings that worked very nicely to slice and dice King Ghidora.
Since the 90s, Mothra marrionettes have included robotics. If you watch the "making of" for GMK, you can see them build Mothra and the suits, and test the robotic Mothra and the robotic heads. Godzilla's head was especially impressive: it could roll and blink its eyes, shake its head and bare its teeth. The soft latex "skin" was moved by robotic "muscles" underneath. Also, Godzilla could breath.
Would someone kindly photograph an Atlas moth (a large Malaysian moth with the same orange stripped body as Mothra) in that gizmo and send the results to Toho? Mothra would appreciate that very much.
"It's a miracle! The sea water has once again created new life."
Moll, "Rebirth of Mothra 2"
The new "Godzilla X Mechagodzilla" will be opening in Japanese theaters on December 14th.
It's just a plan for Meterological Weapons (Weapons of Meterorological Destruction).
If you get a large group of gigantic[1] butterflies flapping their wings on one side of the planet, can you imagine the havoc it would create on the other side of the planet. Hurricanes, Whirlwinds and Typhoons at the drop of a hat (or flap of a wing).
[1] Gigantic on the butterfly scale of things.
Danny Dunn had a dragonfly made out of super light and tough plastic propelled by jets of air, and eyes that were hooked up to a helmet you put over your head. The helmet gave you a 280+/- degree view of your surroundings, and allowed you to hear what was going on in the vicinity. It was completely immersive and seamless to the user. (VR!)
Pretty cool for 50s-early 60's tech. :)
A lot of really smart people have been working on this for a while now, and even the 'simplest' insects have us beat by a long shot.
Simply put, our robotics sucks. It takes immense processing power to have a robot that can pick up a cup of water, so long as the cup is *always* in the exact same place, the arm in the exact same start position.
Now try making your casio watch navigate all the way to Mexico using scent and light to guide it.
Anyways, insects have decentralized nervous systems compared to ours, so I think it's safe to say that it's brain "knows" about flying. You can consider the whole nervous system it's 'brain'.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
"This will allow them to be used in rescue missions, cave exploration and possibly even on Mars."
Or by microsoft for advertising purposes!
This will allow them to be used in rescue missions
How many butterflies does it take to pry open the door of an automobile and lift the occupant to safety? How many to put out a house fire? Or rescue a downing person swept away in a flood? Or locate an Altzheimer's patient who has wandered away from home?
That's what I thought.
It's interesting research, but lets not blow this out of proportion or set unrealistic expectations by exaggerating the usefulness of the (proposed) technology.
No, but we're getting better. Check out Asimo and his home page. (Yes, I submitted it. ;^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Who is it this week? I've been avoiding the propag^H^H^H^H^H^H news lately...
Google Search. How hard was that?
I haven't been there in several years, but one of the things I always loved was that in the video you watch whilst waiting in the lobby, there was a fantastic shot of a person touching a butterfly that - upon close examination - was actually a robot (i.e. by the cyberdyne corp. in the video).
Of course, I'm also having a vision of Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, not so much because he mentioned robot butterflies (he didn't, in fact) but just the general concept he had of nano-tech gardens.
"Stumble before you crawl"
Nobody suspects the butterfly!!!! MUHAHAHAHAHAHA
Here's a link to it: http://www.cosmiverse.com/space12030102.html
It also explains how the thin atmosphere of Mars actually works to help their design of a flapping winged robot.
I used to have a good sig...
Very soon there will be nowhere to hide, as flying/airborne networks of 'bugs' with full audio-visual capability will be all over, indoors and out, in due time. There's no way to stop this and I'm not saying we should try, but it will make life 'interesting' in ways we can barely conceive of right now.
Mosquito nets, repellant and bugspray will take on new meanings in the not-too-distant future.
**>>BELCH
So let me get this straight...NASA is considering sendng Iron Butterfly to Mars? Quite frankly, I think until we get the issue of the boy bands booked on one way trips resolved, we shouldn't worry about sending these guys.
Although In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida would make for much cooler space music than Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
Fun stuff to look into - I seem to remember not too long ago a /. article on a MAV constructed in which they posted a white paper (in PDF format, IIRC) on the device - it was pretty small, several centimeter wingspan, used a pager motor for propulsion and custom micro-servos for control, and had an onboard wireless video camera. I remember that supposedly it could stay aloft for up to 30 minutes of flight time, and was made from dense styrofoam. The white paper was detailed enough that someone (aka - r/c flight hobbiest) could easily build such a thing from the description and pictures given.
I suggest that if you are interested in building such a thing, look into using parts from micro-RC race cars. Some people are already experimenting - I read about one guy in Japan who tried to build a micro plane from his micro-car parts by attaching them to a small balsa glider (it didn't work very well - but it was a start)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
... by Cyberdyne Systems. Didn't you see their promotional video? "Imagine a world... where butterflies run on batteries."
You can take some new technology and give it an Orwellian spin.
Gosh, can you imagine what would happen if tens of thousands of people had small portable, self contained powered, remote, broadcastable color TV cameras...
oh wait they do
-Malakai
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
I first heard about this on NPR, where they were discussing its millitary applications, as in, sending small, insectoid robotic spies into the caves where terrorists are suspected to be hiding, etc.
What fascinated me was what they'd discovered about the flight patterns of butterflies. Apparently the idea of a "chaos butterfly" has another meaning. A butterfly's flight is literally random. Their wings are controlled by around 5 sets of muscles, each causing a different kind of movement, which causes their erratic flight. The thing is, the researchers can't find a pattern to it. The military was looking at butterflies because of this erratic flight pattern. It makes them nearly impossible to catch. Very good for spy-bugs.
But in all truth, the science is really awesome, but the proposed military applications are disturbing. If they have robotic bug-spies.. they could literally have eyes anywhere, and who says they'd restrict it to enemy territory? This is the war on terrorism, a war which Bush is assuming is on the home front, and I think he's already shown how far he will go to root out suspected terrorists.
~The Incredible Xan~
"Saying that men can't be lesbians is gender discrimination."
...if you have something like the BattleSuits in Heinleins's "Starship Troopers"? That's where we gotta go. If you can stomp on 'em, you won't have to spy on 'em. URAH! :})||
BzzzzzzzSLAP!
Damn! Tell them to send another one...
Liberty uber alles.