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RoboFly
Quite a number of people wrote to us yesterday about The San Francisco Chronicle running an article about robotic flies with cameras. Pretty cool looking thing - capable of flight, with four wings - although the whole steering thing still needs be resolved, apparently.
she swallowed a fly. Perhaps she'll die...
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I think it was a Danny Dunn book that I read as a kid. The books were about this kid who had a relative/friend/somebody who was a engineer/scientist type person that was always building cool stuff. One book had a robotic dragon fly with cameras in its eyes that projected back into a helmet so you could feel like you were flying with it. I always thought that was cool.
I've heard of people putting cameras on RC airplanes, but they only display the pictures on TVs and not wrap around helmets.
This sounds like a step closer to the book...
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Sort of off topic, but RoboCop was released in 1987. RoboCop 2 was released in 1990.
Geoff Wozniak
gzw@home.com
"The potential application of a robot based on a fly might be, in an urban environment, clandestine surveillance nd reconnaissance,'' said Teresa McMullen of the Office of Naval Research.
In other words, that fly might be a spy. Just the thing for keeping tabs on terrorists. Or wandering spouses.
Does anybody else find this really disturbing...
Next Invention: Roboflies that can read thought.
--
RumorsDaily
I'm thinking that with something as small as these guys, we all just pull out our biggest encryption tool, the RoboFlySWATTER!
When you need your confidentiality, lock the doors, close the windows, and whip out the swatter to make fast work of one spyflys.
Bruce Sterling? Copycat. Max Headroom? Yawn, how derivative. Doesn't anyone else remember where this idea really came from?!??
I've wanted an "Isit" for almost years now, ever since I read that book in the 6th grade. Now, it looks like it's gonna happen! I can hardly wait for the Sony model.
Imagine killer robots whose only job is to find cockroaches, and then attack. Small enough to fit into the same cracks bugs can, but intelligent enough to hunt them. Be really evil and add pheromones to them so that the roaches will actually come sniffing around. All it would take to kill them would be some kind of unit to heavily scratch their chitin coatings.... An end to evil pesticides, and cockroaches too.
David Brin has been pointing out that privacy is going away, because of things like this (causing people to flame him because they think Brin is advocating the loss of privacy, rather than simply predicting it). What's the use of PGP when the fly in the corner is recording your passphrase?
Brin advocates making the lack of privacy democratic: not only can the authorities spy on the public, but anyone in the public can spy on the authorities. No cop would get away with beating a confession out of a suspect ever again, not with hundreds of cameras following his every move.
I don't much like the surveillance society, but I'm afraid that it's coming, and our only choice is to let everyone be a watcher as well as a watchee, or to have a police state the likes of which have never been seen before
For those who think we can pass laws against roboflys, yeah, right. The things will soon be practically invisible, as Moore's Law means that they'll halve in size every couple of years. Laws will be ignored. There will be "arms races" as techologies for detecting micro-spy devices competes with other technology for foiling such detection.
Yup, published in '74! The Danny Dunn series got me hooked not only on sci-fi but reading in general, and probably started me on my path toward my electrical engineering career. Robotic flys, virtual reality AND military conspiracies -- more than enough to capture a 10-year-old boy's imagination in 1976.
you're
100% Pure Evil With The Look And Feel Of Wholesome Goodness
Yes, especially when the robotic flies get caught by an ordinary spider. :)
We saw a "SlugBot" article on Slashdot today... When these robotic flies become more common, maybe people who don't like being watched will have robotic spiders that feed on robotic flies.
I know an old lady who swallowed a robotic spider
She swallowed the robotic spider to catch the robotic fly
But I don't know why she swallowed the robotic fly
Perhaps she'll be deactivated
Read more next time yourself ;-P
:-)
I can only see two wings.. Maybe the article is just wrong...
Wouldn't be the first time reporters got confused..
I was saying that perhaps THE ARTICLE WAS WRONG in saying that it had FOUR wings, since I only saw two.
ahhh...
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Imagine the Protential for Getting Nude Pics of People that you want?
:)
mmm, that nude pic of Britany Spears I always wanted could be a reality
Actually, the video feed would be encoded in the buzzing, and then a laser eavesdropper against a window would take care of the rest.
The movie you're asking about is Runaway. Huh- another Michael Crichton movie! I like his stories.
It's interesting that you mention that movie, because a lot of the concepts in it are becoming feasible now. Runaway had floating surveillance cameras, "lock-ons" which would track your car and attempt to blow it up, and smart bullets that sought out particular heat signatures. Not to mention the nasty little spider robots.
These roboflies could certainly handle some of the tracking and surveillance.
And companies are looking into ways to disable automobiles from a distance for police departments. A robot deployed from a police car in front of the offender futzes up the electronic fuel injection or ignition. Sucks to be you!
Little Debian: America's #1 Snack Distro!
Well, consider something, I don't think we yet have the technology to allow something that small to record the information, so that means it has to transmit it, so that means it should relativly easy to discover one in at least a closed envirorment, so it is not that much of a concern, we will just have literal bug detectors, *ba dump bump*.
Although once technology allows us to record at that small a scale then, the suggestions for anit-robo fly flies is probably the way to go.
Time to make some miniature hand-held EMPs for taking out bugs. Just press the button and 'clunk' falls the fly on the floor.
40 comments so far and nobody's mentioned the robotic spy-fly from Max Headroom? Of course, it got splatted in a big way, but that's life when you're a fly.
Yet another good show killed by lame TV programming execs. Blah.
I don't like this one bit, no sir, I don't.
I won't be able to pick my nose, scratch my butt, or posture in front of the bathroom mirror without the fear of seeing myself on someone's website, or America's Most Candid Videos.
Anyne know of Kafka's Panopticon? That's where we're heading.
The Panopticon was a cylindrical prison, walled to the outside, but open/bar-doored to the inside. There was a watch tower in the center of the prison yard that shone bright light through the bars of all of the cells, lighting them up for the watchman to see.
There was a single watchman, with a sniper rifle, and the only punishment for misbehavior was execution. Prisoners sat in their cells, not able to see the tower or other cells well, due to the bright lights, and not aware of wether or not the watchman was looking at them or not.
The sense of potential observation, coupled with the occasional gunshot (for effect) eventually makes a watchman unnecessary, since the fear of being caught results in 'appropriate' behavior.
Once a society feels that it can at any moment be watched, it changes it's behavior patterns. We would become slaves, behaving in accordance with what is expected instead of what's natural and normal.
Spy-flies are a very bad, BAD, thing.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I can only see two wings.. Maybe the article is just wrong...
Picture 1 and Picture 2
Wouldn't be the first time reporters got confused..
Little sucker though isn't it?
Still, I have to wonder about specs? What is the weight of this thing? Any ideas on speed of the wings? Are we talking hummingbird here or what? Give us details...
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I was thinking maybe some sort of helicopter-style thing is going on here. (Ie, helicopters get their forward thrust by tilting forward slightly and letting the rotors move them in that direction.) If the fly had a spinning gyroscope inside it, then when the fly tried to tilt the gyroscope with respect to itself, the fly would actually be the one to tilt. The gyroscope would tend to remain in the same orientation.
This way, the hovering fly tilts forward (or backward [or sideways?!]), and its beating wings would carry it in that direction.
Of course, this is all one freaking big intuitive leap, probably off an even bigger, freakier cliff.
I am a man of const int sorrows
check out the real site: http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ronf/mfi.html Bug zappers work pretty good for real flies. They don't need propulsion systems or anything because you can just hang them out on your porch. All you need is a "bug zapper" that can attract these flies by maybe influencing their visual processing? -Scott- intelligreed@yahoo.com
Oh thats great! Now not only can I see what my cat sees when it's eating a fly, but what the fly sees as well.
Solar Constant at 1AU ~ 3500 W/m^2
Efficiency of Best Cells ~ 15%
Surface Area of Robofly ??? ~ 20mm^2 (2e-5m^2)
Now the average tropical daylight solar availability is much lower, around 1800 W/m^2
The best cells for efficiency are not
flexible enough to use on the wings, and
are pretty dense. Lets just assume that it is possible to find such a cell, and that it has an efficiency comparable to Silicon (~9%) even though we know they won't work either. Oh, you can forget that weight estimate of 43mg they gave too. Mylar wings aren't going to collect power.
Now with my wild-ass guess of 20mm^2 for the upper surface area, we get about 3.2mW total available power. But wait, that is for a fly sitting flat still with every bit of its surface area perpindicular to a bright tropical sun. Once those wings start flapping and turning, any part that is more than 60 degrees from the sun will lose power completely, and any lesser angle will still mean significant loss of efficiency.
In operation, outside in daylight, I'd expect the fly to be receiving an average of around 1mW. Indoors, an order of magnitude lower (0.1mW).
Never say Never, but certainly not in the next decade.
There was an episode of Max Headroom (I first saw this one in 1987!!) where a robotic fly with basically a webcam is used to spy on the board of Network XXIII. Unfortunately it lands on one of the board members' shoulder and another guy swats it with his scarf, thinking it was just a pesky housefly. Of course, the fly was invented and built by Bryce, who was very upset at its demise.
I would have forgotten all about it but this was rerun on Bravo this weekend. Funny coincidence.
Something to do with the way air doesn't act like air as you scale down. At a flies level, it's almost like swimming in honey, most laws of aerodynamics as we know them no longer work. Ah, discovery channel, eases the pain... =) matt
As I see it, there could be great uses for this fly as long as the Evil Big Brother doesn't get to use them. (Fat chance for *that*)
The really dangerous part, though, comes when they construct a RoboBee with poison!
(I believe I saw this on "Mission Impossible" or something.)
But since the army seem to want this fly, and other technology like it, there isn't much to do.
National and international laws about weapons and spy tech are inneffective since most goverments unofficially ignore them, but it's the only way to restrict the usage once the technology is there.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
I recall seeing an idea for alternative power (albeit in an automobile) through use of high speed gyros. Maybe some power could be stored and drawn in a dual-purpose gyro. BTW: my first response after reading the article was "Is this a hoax?" It doesn't seem to be, but yeah, seems pretty premature.
Anyway, I gotta go rent Blade Runner again.
...and that's the end of our show. Donk!
to graft the camera and transmitter onto a real fly, then figure out how to control its brain so it will fly where desired. Also, you could splice into the fly's optic nerve so you don't even need the camera.
As a long-range goal, they could genetically engineer fly DNA to grow the camera and transmitter.
There is a classic essay by J.B.S. Haldane entitled "On Being The Right Size" that addresses this issue.
In the case of the micro-mini 747, the air molecules aren't scaled down so their fluid behavior would be different. Also, the molecules that make up the steel aren't scaled down either, thus their structural properties would be different.
The key is the basic fact that surface area increases by the square of linear dimensions, and volume (and thus mass) increases by the cube. That's why a real life King Kong would break his legs with every step, why rodents have to eat many times their body weight, and why flies can stick to ceilings.
Why, the people (characters) in the book seemed to manage OK. It is not as if one can turn back the technology clock - it only goes forward (save macro-war).
Devout follower of The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.
Sounds innocent at first then before you know it your minus a limb and your best friend is put on ice. This has bad idea written all over it.
Its creators are not mad scientists but Ph.D.s.
This reporter obviously doesn't know much about mad scientists.
The Navy loved robofly. It also loved robolobster, now being built at Northeastern University, and robopike, which swims in a tank at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
They were also very impressed by Robocop, a 1990 film that may well be one of the best movies of all time.
And this bit I didn't understand at all. Can someone elucidate?
But why a fly? Why not something with a little more pizzazz like, say, a dragonfly?
Two reasons, said Ron Fearing, the top gun behind the micromechanical flying insect. First, dragonflies have four wings.
``That automatically doubles the complexity of the project,'' Fearing said.
So instead they built a fly with four wings.
What about the 'Big Brother' factor here!
I think this is a Bad Thing.
sure, robotic flies are cool and all, but this could easily be used to spy on anybody especially when these things are cheap to produce.
and what about stalkers and voyeurs. these things must be very hard to spot.
I don't like the idea that anyone could buy a cheap robotic fly and spy on anyone he wants.
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This will entirely change the concept 'Web cam' :-)
Imagine users all over the net fighting over the controls of such cams at Jenny's
Seriously, though, this brings up a number of privacy issues. Sub-miniature, mobile, remotely-operable and/or self-navigating cameras could raise a number of privacy issues. From size alone, they'd be very difficult to detect by eye.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
We already had GnuGP and ipchains; now FlySwat?
-- Colin
This is another article like all the rest posted on slashdot about people being able to do surveillance on anyone else at anytime....Spooky. ALso interesting that their seems to be trend (or not) where scientific discovery starts with an old saying, "Fly on the wall for just one day"....of course I would imagine the Porn industry will love this new way of gettting live video feeds........
Funny and I thought Perl == Paid employment recently located
Imagine being able to film a seen from 1000 angles at once - any angle - without any trusses! :)
That'll be as soon as we get their gigatic cameras down to the size of a fly. But still with some (very) intelligent interpolation, you could proably build a decent 3d model on the fly.
(pun unintened
See you, space cowboy...
Hmm, I wonder if the White House got ventilation shafts :-)
That would set the big brother factor down a notch. Make RoboFlyBot RoboFly-Powered RoboFly-Hunting Robot. It'd be like transformers, robots hunting robots. They could even recycle the roboflies to make more predators... mmm... pretty cool.
Stonehand wrote:
How do they get the information *out*? Does it just store a small number of images, and have to fly back to be recovered, or does it transmit over radio (and thus increase the risk of detection?)
They could probably just transmit "live" information "on the fly", but at extremely low signal levels.
If we have technology that can detect radio frequency noise from millions of light years from earth...
... who says we can't detect extremely weak signals from our spyflies from low earth orbit?
If the fly gets discovered and squished, at least the data/images have already been sent and it's too late. The data is the valuable part of the spyfly equation, not the fly itself.
People need to rethink other unrelated capabilities in the technology spectrum and realize that they ARE being combined and used for "other" purposes by the government.(some of them can be downright EVIL.)
ssssssh! We shouldn't talk here. Big Brother is watching.
Quick transmission bursts, followed by a quick relocation would probably help. Multiply that by a couple hundred flies, should keep it pretty safe.
...Not much point in hardcore encryption if a buzzy thing can read what's on your screen.
How would one go about thwarting cameras of this size? - Any opening into a building would present a risk.
(and of course - anyone famous would be constantly surrounded by a halo of flies...)
Heres mine:
Would these flies be susceptible to EMP?
And I'm assuming these flies will be transmitting, wouldn't it be possible to jam those transmissions?
And Finally: Robotic spiders.
Actually, the algorithm that ants use to explore their surroundings and find the shortest paths to food is based on reinforcement learning, not fuzzy logic. There's a good paper by Subramanian, Druschel and Chen on how this relates to dynamic network routing. Here's a link. And here's the follow up.
------- Driver carries less than 64K of cache.
A couple things caught my eye about this article.
1) It doesn't look like the thing is even flying yet. Much less having independant operation, much less sending back a signal, much less actually having a camera mounted on it. Sounds like this article is VERY, VERY premature. Sounds a bit like writing up Star Trek as a news story...reality is probably going to look a lot different.
2) They claimed it is solar powered. Now, I *really* have trouble imagining a solar power collection system providing enough power to actually make it fly. I believe plants have the most efficient solar energy collection and conversion systems around (I could be quite wrong on this, actually), and I've never seen a flying plant. No biological fly uses solar power. I can't believe this thing is going to fly purely on solar power, and I really question how they are going to put ANY power plant on the thing so small and yet power everything that needs to be powered:
* Processor (and it will probably be quite a processor!)
* Propulsion system
* Video camera
* Transmitter
* Receiver (gotta be able to update its directions, eh?)
* Some kind of energy storage system, as if it is supposed to go indoors, in rubble, etc., or work at night, it won't be able to be purely solar powered. This of course means that it will have to collect more than 100% of its energy requirements to "bank" the extra for when solar isn't available.
Up to the point the point where I saw "Robofly will be powered by the sun", I thought it was just some interesting research that may or may not lead anywhere near its original goal, but upon seing that it was to be solar powered, I'm starting to think it sounds more like fraud. Or a reporter who got something VERY wrong. Personally, I'd find any energy STORAGE system that could propel a tiny flying machine for more than a few seconds very, very facinating.
Nick.
Will it really fly? I saw a demonstration of a minature helicopter (about the size of this robofly) at Stanford a few weeks ago. They can create the necessary lift, but the big problem is control. Control not just in the sense of being able to tell it where to go, but at a more basic level -- a matter of system stability (e.g. real helicopters need complex control systems to keep them stable). The reporter may have missed this, and thought that by 'control', the scientists just meant being able to tell the fly where to go.
Imagine a fly-by in the near-future.. where an cyankali upgraded robofly maybe powered with some ai on a nanochip can assassin someone, how could you protect from such a thing? ..scary.. -Sarin.
Read "Danny Dunn, Invisible boy." which I imagine the creators of this did.
It was The Fifth Element,
It was used to spy on the president by Gary Oldmans character...
_ Light travels faster than sound. That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.... -
Will soon be standard elements of basic computer security.
Kooky!
**>>BELCH
They will transmit (or, if neccessary to avoid radio detection, physically 'download') data to a larger, less-mobile but more powerful 'queen bee', which will then broadcast (or whatever) the data to another location. If neccessary you could have a series of queens linked together over a long distance with discrete 'swarms' of roboflys (bugs).
**>>BELCH
We will make insects to monitor you - they can be made to carry small little doses of lethal poison and kill you - they can be made to search out and destroy other small insects - robot and real - you are helpless against our technology. A man cannot press a button if a fly has shot some cyanide into his bloodstream and he dies! Can you imagine the possibilities Lets start a new extermination company with these things - the roach that crawled over your babies bed - we will hunt him down - attach a camera to the robocockroach - you will be able to control him from your computer and 3d glasses - hunt and destroy the real cockroach and all its evil brothers - that would be fun and entertaining as hell. Get a game called bad mojo and check out the future - I loved that game and it is a sign of things to come.
I think Robofly probably won't be a good spying device. If its really similar to a real fly it probably won't be able to fly fast and it would just as a visible. I'm sure you find it real easy to notice flys especially when they fly around. Since its main spying device is a camera it would have to operate in plain view. That makes it worse.
Having just finished Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age", I find this vaguely disturbing ...
[Insert pithy quote here]
In the article, they also mention the Robopike. Here is a link to the robopike page at MIT.
t ml
http://web.mit.edu/towtank/www/pike/
And robotuna! A full-size craft for humans on the same foil concept.
http://web.mit.edu/towtank/www/tuna/brad/tuna.h
--
rJames.org - illustration
They are slighty annoying. I see them around the office, spying on me. The got those evil robotic eyes, zooming in on me and recording my every move. I want to find out who is watching me, any ideas? I hate them.
the surveillance industry is in for a big windfall as long as advances like these keep up. just imagine counter roboflies that seek out possible roboflies and destroys them on sight. we could have a miniature world war going on with surveillance counter surveillance tech like this . hmm I want the movie rights to this.
Music the Paint dancefloor the canvas your body the brush
Be fun to have them seek out other bugs and take them out via super fly. Hehe, super-fly versus bio-fly. Egag, Borg flies, they can fly around attach to a real flies and whamo! tons of super flies. Are these bugs running on batteries?
Left shift 1 for e-mail...
Real flies have multifaceted fixed eyes. Basically like a bunch of 1-pixel CCD elements at the bottom of a honeycomb. The fly's brain would have to do some image processing to figure out which way to fly.
What will they think of next... Robo-Ali stings like a bee, floats like a fly? they've GOT be some dodgy issues with mouting a camera on this tiny little big thing surely.. where's privacy in this world?
Wasn't there a cockroach with a camera on its back in Starship Troopers? Or was that the Fifth Element? Anyway, I remember a general in a situation room squishing it.
Comment seems to be divided between 'that's really cool!' and 'but what of the privacy risks?' I have the ideal solution--only let me and my friends use flycams. We would only use them for Good, you see...
Customer: Waiter, what's this fly doing in my soup?
Waiter: Looks like he's filming you sir.
It's just not as funny.
You say you want a revolution?
Why not have a RoboPigeon that goes in behind the RoboFly and deploys some of that IP transmission "dust"?
In the article, they say "...the aerodynamic principles that keep 747s aloft do not work on such a small a scale." And the article on Micrplanes agrees when they say "...Aerodynamics aren't proportional like mechanical miniaturization..."
Why not? If you could, in theory, take everything in a plane a 747 scale it down (jet engine and all) why would it not fly a scale distance?
How small can we make cameras these days? Enough resolution for an AI chip to recognize objects and fly around (pretending for a moment that we could do image recognition of that quality, although the Mars lander did)
My sister and a couple of my friends are doing research on this. I'm being pushed into it as well.
The article mentioned that the tiny gyroscopes developed at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena will be used, but it didn't mention how.
I was imagining how the roboflies might be used and then realized that they must be able to train the camera focus on an image on the 'fly'. Having to make the r-fly hover, in order to get a quality image, would make the r-fly suspect to counter-surveillance techniques (flyswatters). And then there is the problem of maintaining stability in shifting air currents.
Real flies operate this way. Their eyes move independently of their bodies, so they can fly around an object while keeping their eyes on on the object.
This is very interesting technology. I had been musing over biomimetics for a few years, although I didn't have a term for it. I mean, take a look at an ant hill sometime. The heuristics of an ant colony sings fuzzy logic to me.
"Classic UFO's
But they might not nessecarily need to reduce their cameras. Just transmit the image. Have one or two 'good' cameras that will take good images of the entire thing. Then have these flies getting images of all over. Use the flies' images as maps and the good cameras as the images, combine the two and you could probably end up with a film that really can be considered 3d. Then you could allow for the broadcast of the movie from any angle. Or even maybe selectable angles. Yeah having the couple good cameras could be a pain to get stuff right but I'd think you could produce something good with less than perfect cameras at every position.
-cpd
just think, with a little work on miniaturizing these things, we could have robot fleas for Aibo .^
^.
Suppose they design a fully-working robotic SpyFly, one with good resolution (if not necessarily field-of-view) and stealth. 'suppose then that it manages to pop by, say, Saddam's residence-of-the-day.
How do they get the information *out*? Does it just store a small number of images, and have to fly back to be recovered, or does it transmit over radio (and thus increase the risk of detection?)
I'm not up on bugging technology, obviously. Anybody here follow that sort of stuff?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.