Dragonfly-Sized Insect Spies Spotted, Denied 433
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.
Re:Why waste it on protestors? (Score:1, Interesting)
Doubt it (Score:4, Interesting)
Huge issues.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Cute, but no.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nothing to see (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you ever tried to take a picture of a dragonfly, in flight, with the camera on your mobile?
Re:Why waste it on protestors? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why waste it on protestors? (Score:1, Interesting)
That's one example of a more 'predictable' scenario. Another was their use in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm.
Non-lethal weapons, such as tasers, were first tested in small crowd scenarios before being used in wider police operations.
I'm sure if I googled, I could find plenty of other exmaples.
Re:Was this Burma or USA? (Score:2, Interesting)
Putting all scepticism aside for a moment, can you think of a better place to test something like this out before deploying them? Crowds are unpredictable, they're noisy, they're potentially violent, and there are a lot of eyes present.
Take it one step further (though perhaps beyond the pale of credibility): would a crowd of protesters, nervous people who are looking for surveillance, not be the perfect place to find out how easily one of these craft can be spotted? All those eyes. Maybe that was the point, not the other way around.
Of course, I put no stock in any of this. I'm just saying.
Re:Oblig. (Score:1, Interesting)
I just don't want to see them on a highway...
CNN reports : "A titanium bug slightly, larger than a dragonfly, killed a speeding driver today".
Re:Was this Burma or USA? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.dougneeper.com/news_articles/CIA_Used_Dragonfly_Catfish.htm [dougneeper.com]
The CIA once built a mechanical dragonfly to carry a listening device but found small gusts of wind knocked it off course so it was never used in a spy operation.
After seeing the life-like "insectothopter," Hiley jokes that she cannot look at a dragonfly in the same way anymore.
In the 1970s the CIA had developed a miniature listening device that needed a delivery system, so the agency's scientists looked at building a bumblebee to carry it. They found, however, that the bumblebee was erratic in flight, so the idea was scrapped.
An amateur entymologist on the project then suggested a dragonfly and a prototype was built that became the first flight of an insect-sized machine, Hiley said.
A laser beam steered the dragonfly and a watchmaker on the project crafted a miniature oscillating engine so the wings beat, and the fuel bladder carried liquid propellant.
Despite such ingenuity, the project team lost control over the dragonfly in even a gentle wind. "You watch them in nature, they'll catch a breeze and ride with it. We, of course, needed it to fly to a target. So they were never deployed operationally, but this is a one-of-a-kind piece," Hiley said.
And here's a pic: http://msnbcmedia1.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/070531/070531_spytool3_hmed_10a.hmedium.jpg [msn.com]
Perhaps they've improved the control by now.
Re:Was this Burma or USA? (Score:1, Interesting)
R/C ornithopters are available. (Score:5, Interesting)
R/C ornithopters aren't that rare any more. Check out this video [youtube.com] 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.
Re:Nothing to see (Score:3, Interesting)
1. A dragonfly has 350 degrees of vision -- a 10 degree blind spot is directly behind its tail.
2. (1), along with some neat nervous-system wiring enables dragonflies to "disappear" in plain sight -- they track eye movements of their prey, and stay in the prey's "blind spot".
The result is that prefocus tricks don't work all that well on dragonflies.
Now, a camera doesn't have a blind spot, so using a camera to track the dragonfly should allow you to see it (it will try to stay in the center of the lens if it is trying to hide from it, which will help you out a lot). However, trying to track by eye is extremely difficult, and as the parent states, using wide-angle or telephoto to track will be difficult due to FOV issues.
All of this information is likely useless however, as the "larger than a dragonfly flying machine" likely only has two photosensors and none of the neural circuitry the dragonfly uses to hunt/hide.