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Dragonfly-Sized Insect Spies Spotted, Denied
SRA8 sends in a Washington Post piece about work at various academic, government, and military labs on insect-sized flying spies. A number of people reported what appeared to be flying mechanical insects, larger than dragonflies, over an antiwar rally in Washington DC last month. The reporter got mostly no-comments from the agencies he called trying to pin down what it was they saw. Only the FBI said through a spokesman: "We don't have anything like that." The article describes work on insect cyborgs as well as purely mechanical flying spies, but quotes vice admiral Joe Dyer, former commander of the Naval Air Systems Command now at iRobot in Burlington, Mass., as follows: "I'll be seriously dead before that program deploys." The article also mentions an International Symposium on Flying Insects and Robots, held in Switzerland in August, at which Japanese researchers demonstrated radio-controlled fliers with four-inch wingspans that resemble hawk moths.
I know that it is for sure possible to make a little flying robot. Not "so" hard I would even say. However, what is hard is keeping that little guy with power. I don't think that they have the batteries to power the flight of it, plus the gear to send the pictures back home and not to mention navigation controls. You could maybe manage 5min max for something so small, assuming it was really really light. I dont think 5 min is a useful time though. Who knows, maybe I am wrong though.
Sure, the gov't has limitless budget/captive genius scientists, etc... but really.. the technical hurdles to such a product are enormous... for starters....
Batteries - this would be very difficult to make work for a long time when it has to fly by way of flapping wings!
Control system - Airplanes are *relatively* easy to make a control system for, because they're well studied and time tested(and even this is hard and requires pounds upon pounds of circuitry (yes, the redundancy isn't necessary for a spy bug, but even the smallest processors/accelerometers/gyroscopes weigh more than a fsking bug!). A robot with flapping wings we don't understand well on the original nature-made product? not happening yet!
Reproducing a convincing style of flight
When someone caught/"killed" one, the jig would be up!
What's much more likely is if your "men in black" were to use the hundreds of *readily available* security cameras mounted.... everywhere....
Besides, if it is a protest, what are you hiding? You are OUTSIDE. You are making your desires VISIBLE for the reason of convincing others to take them! you are not in a back room being all clandestine. You want people to see you!
I'm a model hobbiest. I happen to fly RC helicopters in the "small" size range. For those that want to believe these are real, more power to you, honestly. It would be really fun to buy consumer level versions of something similar to the purported goverment versions as I'm sure they would be fun as hell to fly. But frankly..... Helicopters, which are tried and tested technology, at the minature level (I fly one with an 18" rotor diamater) it becomes EXTREMELY unstable in any wind. Shrink that down to a 6" diamater and to be honest, you wouldn't be able to control it in anything but a room with no fans, etc, causing air currents. Now we're talking about dragonfly size? AND outdoors? It's, unfortunately, not a reality. At least in my opinion.
R/C ornithopters aren't that rare any more. Check out this video of the CyBird, which is pigeon-sized and battery powered. The video shows four minutes of aggressive aerobatics; it can be flown longer if you spend more time gliding. This thing costs $149.
Smaller ones are available. The dragonfly-sized ones are usually flown indoors, but if winds are low, they can be used outdoors.
So it could either be some Government agency watching, or somebody in the crowd with an R/C toy.