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Tiny Flyer Navigates Like Fly
Assassin bug writes to tell us the Discovery Channel is reporting on a new ultralight autonomous aircraft that could be the next 'fly on the wall'. From the article: "The 10-gram microflyer, being developed by a team of researchers lead by Dario Floreano at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, has a 36-centimeter (14-inch) wingspan. But it could one day be shrunk to insect size and used for search and rescue."
Who are they planning on rescuing? Commando Ants trained for search and destroy? I could even see this doing assasination missions, a little needle a nerve agent, but sorry search and destroy really?
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or search and destroy?
Like gun power, people will find ways to use them for devious acts.
Hmm. "Search and rescue". Silly Swiss, neutral, impregnably-defended, makers of great chocolate, but they can't even spell "surveillance" right on a grant application! Sheesh.
"Tiny" Flyer ?? // 36-centimeter (14-inch) wingspan//
Sorry, but even most drunken sots would notice a fly with a *14-inch* wingspan.
Post this when the wingspan is 1/16th inch.
Frammin' on the jim-jam, frippin' at the krotz!
search and rescue..
"Well, we're lost. I hope someone is looking for us." (slap) "Damn bugs!"
I like how the author converts 7m x 7m into 75ft by 75ft. Is that how flies see the world?
Why build a fancy flight system to be swatted when we could just take a real fly, attach 2 tiny cameras (four if they're small enough, one for each direction) and a little zapper to zap its brain when it goes the wrong direction we want.
Demented But Determined.
"Indoor environments are really tough," said Erik Steltz, a PhD candidate in electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley... For example, in order to zip around indoor obstacles -- walls, corners, bookcases, furniture, ceilings, etc. -- a flyer needs to see the objects and have the brain power to steer away.
Is there a different method used when outdoors? I've never been, so I don't know.
-Grey
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Unshrink you?! Well that would require some sort of a REbigulator, which is a concept so ridiculous it makes me want to laugh out loud and chortle.. but not at you O holiest of gods with the wrathfulness and the vengence and the bloodrain and the "hey hey hey it hurts me"
It seems to me that the biggest obstacle to making miniaturized robots useful is not how you guide it but how you power it. The article doesn't address that issue.
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But it could one day be shrunk to insect size and used for search and rescue.
Like everybody else has said, this has "spy on everyone" written all over it, in teeny tiny little letters. And naturally, once this new surveillance method is released onto the public, it will become a criminal offense to destroy one of these drones. And they'll know who just did the destroying too, of course. So the next time you hear that little buzzing sound, and raise your hand to swat at the annoying pest, expect a squad of storm troopers, er, police in full riot gear to arrive in the next moment.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
To continue the "why not just use a real mule" line from the "Robotic Pack Mule" -story:
Why not use href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2858">real insects like DARPA is trying to do. Makes more sense to me.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
I wonder if our generation will be the last to enjoy physical privacy. With all the tiny nanotech, internet, webcams, etc coming - will our kids be numb to the fact that some pervert is probably spying on them from a ant-bot, etc.? Even in the shower, hiking, etc? Frankly, this bothers me as much as the thought of government spying.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
The search part I can see, but if I needed to be rescued, I'd prefer they send a helicopter.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Am I the only one tired of these science stories that sound cool...but then you read them and get to the part where they say "and one day in the distant future...asuminig we get funding which is the whole reason for this press release....we could POSSIBLY do X, Y and Z with this!"
Seriously...every time I read one of these and get to the "punchline" at the end I feel like I've been had for 2 minutes of my life.
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It isn't hard to make things smaller. It's the power supply that's the problem. No good shrinking something like this down to the size of an eyeglass screw if you've got to strap a AAA battery to make it fly.
We've got to create new nanoscopic power sources before this type of technology can really take off.
My favourite episode of Max Headroom was the one where Bryce spends all of his time trying to perfect a robotic fly to literally bug an enemy compound. After numerous technical setbacks, they send it off on its debut mission. After bobbing around the room a bit, it abruptly gets swatted out of existence, sending poor Bryce into shock.
Now we fast-forward to 2006, and they're testing a robotic fly in a room where the walls are all painted in stripes. Hmm...
I wonder if our generation will be the last to enjoy physical privacy. With all the tiny nanotech, internet, webcams, etc coming - will our kids be numb to the fact that some pervert is probably spying on them from a ant-bot, etc.? Even in the shower, hiking, etc?
When this finally happens, i.e., when micro surveillance is so cheap, undetectable and ubiquitous that this occurs, and it's really only a matter of time, perhaps personal privacy, outside the context of private internal thought, will simply cease to be a known concept.
Like most creeping invasions of privacy in recent times, I predict that people will slowly but surely, simply accept that they will be videoed, recorded and logged while they sleep, eat, shower, walk, talk, pick their nose, urinate, defecate, flatulate, fornicate, contemplate, drive, high five and while they browse the net. All recordings will of course be subject to 23rd century "photoshopping" and upload to the internet.
To facilitate this shift people will simply stop being embarrassed about just about anything to do with themselves. Being "caught" naked will cease to be a source of embarrassment as people will be monitored naked all of the time, by multiple sources. In a sense, this has already begun to happen with the latest airport security.
You may consider that this will have an upside in that society will "mature", but the reality is people will become even more paranoid. But not about the fact that people are watching their every move, but about what those people think about their every move. Imagine, every article of your clothing will have be made to the latest trend, as anyone you know, or don't know, can view you at any time and pass judgement. At least, so the marketing droids will have you think.
It will be like High-School, only for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and for the rest of your life. A whole new circle of hell, brought to you by mass, uncaring public complancency. Your only succor is that you will be mercifully dead before such an obscenity comes into being, but you'd better call the cremators now anyway, just to be on the sfae side.
May the Maths Be with you!
But this thing is a plane, so it's a bad choice. It's not much use in the great outdoors if it's very small, because the lightest gust of wind is going to send it 50' off course. Besides, the need to maintain forward progress to ensure lift is going to make a fixed-wing aircraft a tool of limited use, except maybe for buzzing drunk schoolmates at the annual picnic.
I completely agree. Flies move by flapping their wings at a high speed, allowing for quick changes in direction and such. Fixed wing aircraft require forward momentum along with changes to control surfaces in order to change direction. The problem with a fixed wing aircraft that is the size of a fly is that not just a gust of wind, but even the tiniest ripple in the surrounding air, will cause it to either stall or move off course. Not to mention they would have to miniaturize everything: the propeller, power source, cameras, and all other on board electronics. The article says that it could one day be used for search and rescue but I don't know how an autonomous robot is going to know to look for humans, unless it has an infared sensor which just adds that much more weight. And even then, they would have to have a computer on the airplane that would understand all of this information. And to think, it has a 14" wingspan right now and all it can do is avoid walls! I'm sure the inventor has good intentions and all but this just sounds completely unreasonable to me.