This question came to me when watching Zero Dark Thirty and seeing what kind of trouble they had when wanting to peer in OBL’s windows. I can understand why there’s nothing you can buy at the mall or even from a specialty catalogue; but I would have thought when faced with a hugely important objective like this, they could throw a billion dollars at some engineers and come up with something. No, just not possible yet? Very surprising to me.
it’s coming - but there is an issue of range and portability - anything light enough to both fly and be that small is not something you’re going to throw in a soldier’s backpack and carry everywhere - you’d pretty much have to have a full-time person dedicated to packing, repairing (at the least, you are looking at small exotic batteries) and operating it and its receiver
If they did have such a thing do you suppose you would know about it?
we’re still fighting the Uncanny Valley in computer animation, attempting to do the same with mechanical parts is a different deposit of unobtanium.
I Love Me: Sure, I see that point; do you think then that in reality they got a nice close look at OBL and just fed the public all this stuff about having ambiguous satellite photos so they wouldn’t have to admit what kind of surveillance technology they actually used?
ETA: Shijinn, they don’t have to make it look exactly right when holding still at close range. If a bird or bug flies by someone’s window, no one looks closely. I mean, fish have been getting fooled by “flies” for years.
Seconded!
Just look at what kind of imagery you can get for free on the interwebz. Now imagine what the ‘guvmint’ can see! :eek: “Big Brother” is watching you!
Here’s a TED Talk about a robotic bird. I doubt it can be used for surveillance but that’s probably not too far off.
“Small”, “light”, and “mechanically complex” is really really hard to do.
It’s orders of magnitude harder when you add “rugged”, “reliable”, and “easy to use”.
Add “2 way –high bandwidth wireless communication”, “long range”, and “long endurance” and you’ve got one damn hell of an engineering problem.
well personally, my eyes are drawn to movement. anything that flies will invite scrutiny. also, despite popular opinion, the average Joe is smarter than a fish; and anything from an odd flying pattern, sounds, posture, whatever, will scream odd.
Google “micro UAV” (Unmanned Air Vehicle).
It’s been a huge interest of the government and research labs (or both) for some time now.
This, plus there’s the camera. Getting a useful image in questionable and changing light out of something that could pass for a real critter is gonna be impressive.
In regards to the OP, if the key issue you’re talking about is making a ‘flapping wing’ type micro-drone then that’ll be a while. Even though it’s said (truthfully) that helicopters are inherently unstable (compared to fixed wing aircraft) a robotic, reciprocating-wing flying mechanism would be a nightmare of complexity, power & stability. And other than the goal of eventually maybe being able to disguise it as a bird or bug there’s no advantage over smoothly spinning rotors.
Nature, for all its achievements, really can’t evolve any kind of separate spinning ‘wheel’. Here’s Cecil’s take on why…
I knew I’d seen something about this recently in a magazine, here ya go
I don’t think it actually flies yet, and the video is more about the production method, but it’s still interesting. They’re talking about cheap mass production, so maybe a swarm of mobees randomly flitting about with POV camera eyes could feed enough data to a computer to cull out something of value. Probably not stealth, though.
Ok, that link is from a year ago, this one seems to be state of the art, still not flying, yet, even with an external power source.
Cool as hell granted, and possibly a significant step, but as cool as that is there’s no camera, flight control, guidance system, communication system, onboard power supply, etc…
All of those things at their current level of technology most likely could not even be fitted on that frame much less carried aloft and controlled.
This is a great example of what needs to be developed to realize the goal of the OP. Someone found a really great way to make a frame but we still don’t have all the stuff we need to bolt on to it in a small and light enough package to make it feasable.
Here’s a robotic dragonfly made by some people at GeorgiaTech with a grant from USAF, you can get one for $99 and it works:
Wow, what a schizoid thread. About half of you are saying it’s just a bridge too far with current technological ability even if you throw a billion dollars at it; then the other half are saying I’ll probably be able to buy one fairly cheap for my kids next Christmas! LOL
Looks very cool!
Well, think of it like people thought about cars 100 years ago. We did make advances in automobile technology but not in the way they’d expect.
We will have some kind of probes that look like birds and insects.
But such probes that can be deployed in a military capacity in the way you imagine are way beyond the state of the art.
Think flying cars. We already have something things that are kind of like cars but also fly.
But we don’t have ubiquitous flying cars that get 30 miles a gallon, full wi-fi inside, looks like a regular car, goes 500 mph, and can be driven with minimal training. And throwing a billion dollars at that problem won’t solve it, either. We’ll get further along but no amount of money solves basic physical limitations.