The word drone has never had a particularly positive connotation. Whether it’s being used to describe a boring, unending monotone or a weaponized harbinger of death, a drone is something to escape. Which is perhaps why some commercial drone makers instead market their gadgets as quadcopters.
Soon, however, these devices might fly by unnoticed. That's because some of them are being shrunk down to the size of insects, meaning they could become just as pervasive and just as insidious. While no government agency has admitted to deploying insect drones, they have reportedly been in the works for years. DARPA, as it often does, says many of these insect drones are for "disaster relief."
Whatever their ultimate purpose, these insect drones involve impressive feats of engineering. Check out the gallery to see how these tiny (and possibly lethal) drones mimic the vision, body, wing performance, landing, and behavior of their non-weaponized insect counterparts.
A drone has to "see" where it's going. And if it's going to replicate insect features, it had better employ one of an insect's best adaptations: the compound eye. A team from the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne has developed CURVACE
(Curved Artificial Compound Eyes). It comprises a microlens array, a neuromorphic photodetector array, and a flexible printed circuit board that are cut, arranged, and curved in an attempt to recreate the fast motion perception of bug vision.
One challenge in keeping drones airborne is bad weather and windy conditions. The team at the Tactical Robots division of Physical Sciences, Inc. (PSI) "embraced the lessons of nature" in developing the Instant Eye
, a small and nimble device that can zip through tree brush and power lines and be in the sky within seconds. “Through the study of insects such as the Hawk Moth, PSI was able to create what was, at the time, the smallest, fastest reacting UAV autopilot and a family of small flying robots that displayed flight performance only seen in nature." That led to the Instant Eye (above) and the newer, folding arm version
An insect-sized robot
from the Harvard Microbiotics Laboratory can flap its wings and get around in a way that roughly mimics the passive wing pitching reversal that allows flying bugs to hover.
4. Landing Gear
This DARPA development isn't small-scale but it's insect-inspired. A helicopter landing can be rocky. To smooth things out, DARPA's Mission Adaptive Rotor program created landing gear that mimicked the articulated, jointed legs of insects and placed contact sensors at their "feet." The equipment was put on a drone and DARPA found the combination kept the body of the helicopter stable when it landed on surfaces that slope 20 degrees, which is over twice the capabilities of current machines. While the gear is meant for helicopters, the advancement could help insect-sized drones.
An inherent part of an insect's success is its instinct. DARPA's Fast Lightweight Autonomy program is looking for software solutions
to help tiny drones maneuver adeptly and quickly through dense or tight areas. DARPA used a video of a Goshawk's flight to show the reaction times and capabilities it wants its drones to have.
Insects do go it alone sometimes but to be extra effective, they can carry out a task in a swarm. The GRASP (General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception) Laboratory at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania put this to the test for a paper
that said "smaller quadrotors exhibit higher accelerations, allowing more rapid adaptation to disturbances and higher stability."
Naturally, the most important question to ask about an insect drone is, does it take selfies? The palm-sized Nano Selfie Drone from Zano can be controlled by an app and snap overhead photos. It was on display
at CES after earning about $3.5 million on Kickstarter. You can pre-order
it for about $300, but shipments are slow-going.
Oddly, there's more than one selfie drone, and the wearable Nixie nabbed
the $500,000 grand prize at Intel's inaugural Make It Wearable competition last year. From the minds of Christoph Kohstall, Jelena Jovanovic, and Michael Niedermayr, the device was envisioned as a flying pair of glasses, but developed
into a wristband that unfolds into a remote-controlled quadcopter. It's not yet on sale, but you can sign up
to be notified when it is.