This illustration depicts a simulated briefing about the micro-robotic fly and millipede that Dr. Ron Polcawich and his PiezoMEMS team are developing at the Army Research Laboratory, in Adelphi, Md Tiny flying machines need better brains before they can start spying on you. The Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency put out a broad agency announcement this week seeking software solutions to help small drones fly better in tight enclosed environments. The Fast Lightweight Autonomy program, the agency said, “focuses on creating a new class of algorithms to enable small, unmanned aerial vehicles to quickly navigate a labyrinth of rooms, stairways and corridors or other obstacle-filled environments without a remote pilot.” The solicitation doesn’t focus on new drone designs so much as helping very small drones — able to fit through an open window and fly at 45 miles per hour — navigate tight and chaotic indoor spaces without having to communicate with operators, get GPS directions, or receive data from external sensors.

All the thinking, steering and landing would be in the drone. “Goshawks, for example, can fly very fast through a dense forest without smacking into a tree. Many insects, too, can dart and hover with incredible speed and precision. The goal of the FLA program is to explore non-traditional perception and autonomy methods that would give small UAVs the capacity to perform in a similar way, including an ability to easily navigate tight spaces at high speed and quickly recognize if it had already been in a room before,” Mark Micire, DARPA program manager, said in a press release.ar drone motor swap The agency put out this video to demonstrate what they’re looking for.black ops 2 origins drone part locations Urban disaster relief is an “obvious” application for tiny, self-guided insect robots according to the agency. ar drone parrot iphone

An equally obvious application, left out of the announcement, is spy drones that can fly independently into rooms, find a perch, and serve as a fly on the wall in a very real (but robotic) sense of the world. As new materials come online, researchers are quickly getter better at miniaturizing flying machines. Supposedly, the world’s smallest drone is this robofly from Harvard (DARPA funded) at 60 milligrams and 3 centimeters.ar drone 2 parrot youtube The military is working on a version that’s three times smaller. On Dec. 16, the Army Research Laboratory announced that they had created a tiny fly drone of comparable size to the robofly with wings made of lead zirconium titanate. But creating a miniature flying machine isn’t as simple as creating something that can take off and land while attached to a wire. There’s more that goes into flight than pure mechanics. Ron Polcawich, head of the Army Research Lab’s piezoelectric microelectromechanical systems, or PiezoMEMS team, says it may take another 15 years of research before fly drones can move through the air, land and behave like real bugs.

In this paper titled Towards Autonomous Navigation of Miniature , a group of researchers from NASA, IEEE and other outfits describe the high level of difficulty in getting a machine that’s the size of an insect to actually think like one, much less think like a bird. “A major algorithmic challenge is to process sensor information at a high rate to provide vehicle control and higher level tasks with real-time position information and vehicle states.” Why is it such a challenge to make a tiny drone locate itself in space and decide on a destination? Because a flying machine that size doesn’t have much room to carry a computer capable of crunching all the visual data (from a camera) that it needs for flight, especially if it’s also going to carry a battery as well. “Since micro rotorcrafts can only carry a few grams of payload including batteries, this has to be accomplished with a very small weight and power budget… Additionally, novel algorithmic implementations with minimal computational complexity, such as presented in this paper, are required,” they write.

The paper demonstrates an autonomous algorithmic flying solution for a quadcopter of a much more bird-sized 12 grams. No, it doesn’t solve the problem of teaching a computer the size of a golf ball to see, dodge obstacles in the air and land on a dime, but it does provide an idea of where research is headed. “The implementation on an ultra-light weight platform of only 12g is a huge step towards ultimately having a fully capable avionics package (flight computer, camera, and IMU) under 15g. It will enable fully autonomous control of ultrasmall quadrotor systems (as e.g. the 15cm, 25g Bitcraze miniature quadrotor system) that can be deployed for indoor and outdoor [intelligence search and reconaissance] missions in confined spaces while maintaining stealth.” If progress in machine vision algorithms continues at its current rate that 15-year forecast until the flight of the flying robot insects may be conservative.Is this a mosquito? It’s an insect spy drone for urban areas, already in production, funded by the US Government.

It can be remotely controlled and is equipped with a camera and a microphone. It can land on you, and it may have the potential to take a DNA sample or leave RFID tracking nanotechnology on your skin. It can fly through an open window, or it can attach to your clothing until you take it in your home. Mixture of hoax and facts. The story comes with a picture claiming to show a Mosquito spy drone that can take photographs and DNA samples of people, and that it is funded by the U.S government for tracking people. It is a fact that there are reports suggesting that research is going on to develop the MAV's, i.e. Micro Air Vehicles in the form of tiny flying objects like a mosquito. The purpose of these MAVs is to be useful in scientific and military applications. The micro flying robot can have cameras, microphones and other sensors that can take pictures, videos and other useful scientific and biological information from people and places where humans (or the military) cannot reach.

This way the tiny flying robots can also be used as spies and weapons against enemies. In 2007, at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), the latest developments in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were showcased. Scientists talked about the design of micro UAVs of insect-size that actually flap their tiny little wings, and convey important communication information in a given mission. Not just from U.S, there were in total 20 UAV-related papers at the conference, from four continents and eight countries, including Portugal, Germany, France, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, Mexico, and Brazil. In 2008, the U.S. military engineers were trying to design flying robots disguised as insects which can fly and spy on enemies to conduct dangerous missions without risking human lives. Refer to an animated picture in the image section below. Greg Parker, who helps lead this research at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton talks about this saying: "The way we envision it is, there would be a bunch of these sent out in a swarm.

If we know there's a possibility of bad guys in a certain building, how do we find out? We think this would fill that void." Parker and his team planned to start and develop such a bird-sized robot as soon as 2015, followed by the insect-sized models by 2030. The picture shown in the story is not a real robot mosquito drone, but simply one such proposed 'prototype' that may become reality in future, and perhaps they will also be able to take photographs and DNA samples of people. But as of now, these are only speculations, and not facts in practical. A quote from RT America confirms the same: As early as in 2007 the US government was accused of secretly developing robotic insect spies when anti-war protesters in the US saw some flying objects similar to dragonflies or little helicopters hovering above them. No government agency has admitted to developing insect-size spy drones though some official and private organizations have admitted that they were trying. Watch the video, it explains the same story.