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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...
...if the MSN marketroids ever got their hands on this technology...arrgh the butterflies...they're everywhere...
Ceci n'est pas une
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!
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.
...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.
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
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!
Scale is important. Turbulence happens more readily at large scales. Viscous drag is more significant at smaller scales. Gravity is more significant at larger scales. A very small insect is effectively rowing through the air, using most if its effort to propel itself along. An aircraft spends most of its effort creating lift - and drag, because the two always go together - to keep itself up. So, we're not going to have 747's with butterfly-shaped wings flitting from building to building. Which is a shame....
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); }
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
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.
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.
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