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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.
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.
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.
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.
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