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."
search and rescue..
"Well, we're lost. I hope someone is looking for us." (slap) "Damn bugs!"
"sorry sir, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire fleet was swallowed by a small dog."
"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."
If a fly with 4 cameras, a zapper and an antenna flies in, won't you become kinda suspicious?