Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
Exactly!
I read that book many years ago and loved it. Unfortunately, Amazon.com lists it as being out of print.
For those who aren't familiar with the story, the basic plot was that Danny (ick, I hate how books targeted for young readers have to have young characters) has a scientist friend who has created a robotic dragonfly. Danny gets to play around with it, and there's some sort of adventure plot line. It is controled through some virtual reality environment that includes tactile feedback. There's one scene where the dragonfly gets stuck in honey, and Danny feels all sticky.
Essentailly, it's a really cool idea. It has massive privacy issues, but the technology is just a matter of time.
As usual, science fiction preceeds science fact.
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.