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RoboFly 96

Posted by Hemos from the i-want-mothera dept.
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.
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RoboFly

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  • she swallowed a fly. Perhaps she'll die...
  • I think it was a Danny Dunn book that I read as a kid. The books were about this kid who had a relative/friend/somebody who was a engineer/scientist type person that was always building cool stuff. One book had a robotic dragon fly with cameras in its eyes that projected back into a helmet so you could feel like you were flying with it. I always thought that was cool.

    I've heard of people putting cameras on RC airplanes, but they only display the pictures on TVs and not wrap around helmets.

    This sounds like a step closer to the book...
  • Sort of off topic, but RoboCop [imdb.com] was released in 1987. RoboCop 2 [imdb.com] was released in 1990.

    Geoff Wozniak
    gzw@home.com
  • "The potential application of a robot based on a fly might be, in an urban environment, clandestine surveillance nd reconnaissance,'' said Teresa McMullen of the Office of Naval Research.

    In other words, that fly might be a spy. Just the thing for keeping tabs on terrorists. Or wandering spouses.

    Does anybody else find this really disturbing...

    Next Invention: Roboflies that can read thought.

  • David Brin has been pointing out that privacy is going away, because of things like this (causing people to flame him because they think Brin is advocating the loss of privacy, rather than simply predicting it). What's the use of PGP when the fly in the corner is recording your passphrase?

    Brin advocates making the lack of privacy democratic: not only can the authorities spy on the public, but anyone in the public can spy on the authorities. No cop would get away with beating a confession out of a suspect ever again, not with hundreds of cameras following his every move.

    I don't much like the surveillance society, but I'm afraid that it's coming, and our only choice is to let everyone be a watcher as well as a watchee, or to have a police state the likes of which have never been seen before

    For those who think we can pass laws against roboflys, yeah, right. The things will soon be practically invisible, as Moore's Law means that they'll halve in size every couple of years. Laws will be ignored. There will be "arms races" as techologies for detecting micro-spy devices competes with other technology for foiling such detection.

  • > This will entirely change the concept 'Web cam'

    Yes, especially when the robotic flies get caught by an ordinary spider. :)

    We saw a "SlugBot" article on Slashdot today... When these robotic flies become more common, maybe people who don't like being watched will have robotic spiders that feed on robotic flies.

    I know an old lady who swallowed a robotic spider
    She swallowed the robotic spider to catch the robotic fly
    But I don't know why she swallowed the robotic fly
    Perhaps she'll be deactivated

  • Read more next time yourself ;-P

    I can only see two wings.. Maybe the article is just wrong...

    Wouldn't be the first time reporters got confused..

    I was saying that perhaps THE ARTICLE WAS WRONG in saying that it had FOUR wings, since I only saw two. :-)

    ahhh...



    ---
  • Actually, the video feed would be encoded in the buzzing, and then a laser eavesdropper against a window would take care of the rest.

  • The movie you're asking about is Runaway [imdb.com]. Huh- another Michael Crichton movie! I like his stories.

    It's interesting that you mention that movie, because a lot of the concepts in it are becoming feasible now. Runaway had floating surveillance cameras, "lock-ons" which would track your car and attempt to blow it up, and smart bullets that sought out particular heat signatures. Not to mention the nasty little spider robots.

    These roboflies could certainly handle some of the tracking and surveillance.

    And companies are looking into ways to disable automobiles from a distance for police departments. A robot deployed from a police car in front of the offender futzes up the electronic fuel injection or ignition. Sucks to be you!

  • Well, consider something, I don't think we yet have the technology to allow something that small to record the information, so that means it has to transmit it, so that means it should relativly easy to discover one in at least a closed envirorment, so it is not that much of a concern, we will just have literal bug detectors, *ba dump bump*.

    Although once technology allows us to record at that small a scale then, the suggestions for anit-robo fly flies is probably the way to go.
  • Time to make some miniature hand-held EMPs for taking out bugs. Just press the button and 'clunk' falls the fly on the floor.
  • I don't like this one bit, no sir, I don't.

    I won't be able to pick my nose, scratch my butt, or posture in front of the bathroom mirror without the fear of seeing myself on someone's website, or America's Most Candid Videos.

    Anyne know of Kafka's Panopticon? That's where we're heading.

    The Panopticon was a cylindrical prison, walled to the outside, but open/bar-doored to the inside. There was a watch tower in the center of the prison yard that shone bright light through the bars of all of the cells, lighting them up for the watchman to see.

    There was a single watchman, with a sniper rifle, and the only punishment for misbehavior was execution. Prisoners sat in their cells, not able to see the tower or other cells well, due to the bright lights, and not aware of wether or not the watchman was looking at them or not.

    The sense of potential observation, coupled with the occasional gunshot (for effect) eventually makes a watchman unnecessary, since the fear of being caught results in 'appropriate' behavior.

    Once a society feels that it can at any moment be watched, it changes it's behavior patterns. We would become slaves, behaving in accordance with what is expected instead of what's natural and normal.

    Spy-flies are a very bad, BAD, thing.
  • I can only see two wings.. Maybe the article is just wrong...

    Picture 1 [sfgate.com] and Picture 2 [sfgate.com]

    Wouldn't be the first time reporters got confused..

    Little sucker though isn't it?

    Still, I have to wonder about specs? What is the weight of this thing? Any ideas on speed of the wings? Are we talking hummingbird here or what? Give us details...


    ---
  • 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 thinking maybe some sort of helicopter-style thing is going on here. (Ie, helicopters get their forward thrust by tilting forward slightly and letting the rotors move them in that direction.) If the fly had a spinning gyroscope inside it, then when the fly tried to tilt the gyroscope with respect to itself, the fly would actually be the one to tilt. The gyroscope would tend to remain in the same orientation.

    This way, the hovering fly tilts forward (or backward [or sideways?!]), and its beating wings would carry it in that direction.

    Of course, this is all one freaking big intuitive leap, probably off an even bigger, freakier cliff.

  • Solar Constant at 1AU ~ 3500 W/m^2
    Efficiency of Best Cells ~ 15%
    Surface Area of Robofly ??? ~ 20mm^2 (2e-5m^2)

    Now the average tropical daylight solar availability is much lower, around 1800 W/m^2

    The best cells for efficiency are not
    flexible enough to use on the wings, and
    are pretty dense. Lets just assume that it is possible to find such a cell, and that it has an efficiency comparable to Silicon (~9%) even though we know they won't work either. Oh, you can forget that weight estimate of 43mg they gave too. Mylar wings aren't going to collect power.

    Now with my wild-ass guess of 20mm^2 for the upper surface area, we get about 3.2mW total available power. But wait, that is for a fly sitting flat still with every bit of its surface area perpindicular to a bright tropical sun. Once those wings start flapping and turning, any part that is more than 60 degrees from the sun will lose power completely, and any lesser angle will still mean significant loss of efficiency.

    In operation, outside in daylight, I'd expect the fly to be receiving an average of around 1mW. Indoors, an order of magnitude lower (0.1mW).

    Never say Never, but certainly not in the next decade.
  • There was an episode of Max Headroom (I first saw this one in 1987!!) where a robotic fly with basically a webcam is used to spy on the board of Network XXIII. Unfortunately it lands on one of the board members' shoulder and another guy swats it with his scarf, thinking it was just a pesky housefly. Of course, the fly was invented and built by Bryce, who was very upset at its demise.

    I would have forgotten all about it but this was rerun on Bravo this weekend. Funny coincidence.
  • As I see it, there could be great uses for this fly as long as the Evil Big Brother doesn't get to use them. (Fat chance for *that*)

    The really dangerous part, though, comes when they construct a RoboBee with poison!
    (I believe I saw this on "Mission Impossible" or something.)

    But since the army seem to want this fly, and other technology like it, there isn't much to do.
    National and international laws about weapons and spy tech are inneffective since most goverments unofficially ignore them, but it's the only way to restrict the usage once the technology is there.

  • Err, the second half of your post was asking about specs.. ;-P That's what I gave you..
  • I recall seeing an idea for alternative power (albeit in an automobile) through use of high speed gyros. Maybe some power could be stored and drawn in a dual-purpose gyro. BTW: my first response after reading the article was "Is this a hoax?" It doesn't seem to be, but yeah, seems pretty premature.

    Anyway, I gotta go rent Blade Runner again.
  • to graft the camera and transmitter onto a real fly, then figure out how to control its brain so it will fly where desired. Also, you could splice into the fly's optic nerve so you don't even need the camera.

    As a long-range goal, they could genetically engineer fly DNA to grow the camera and transmitter.
  • There is a classic essay by J.B.S. Haldane entitled "On Being The Right Size" that addresses this issue.

    In the case of the micro-mini 747, the air molecules aren't scaled down so their fluid behavior would be different. Also, the molecules that make up the steel aren't scaled down either, thus their structural properties would be different.

    The key is the basic fact that surface area increases by the square of linear dimensions, and volume (and thus mass) increases by the cube. That's why a real life King Kong would break his legs with every step, why rodents have to eat many times their body weight, and why flies can stick to ceilings.

  • Why, the people (characters) in the book [amazon.com] seemed to manage OK. It is not as if one can turn back the technology clock - it only goes forward (save macro-war).
  • ``You could scatter them around and have them send a signal when they find something.''

    Sounds innocent at first then before you know it your minus a limb and your best friend is put on ice. This has bad idea written all over it.

  • a couple of observations (Score:4)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Wednesday November 03, 1999 @02:09AM (#1567469)
    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.
  • What about the 'Big Brother' factor here!
    I think this is a Bad Thing.
    sure, robotic flies are cool and all, but this could easily be used to spy on anybody especially when these things are cheap to produce.
    and what about stalkers and voyeurs. these things must be very hard to spot.
    I don't like the idea that anyone could buy a cheap robotic fly and spy on anyone he wants.


    ---

  • Web cam (Score:2)

    by Fats ( 14870 )
    This will entirely change the concept 'Web cam'
    Imagine users all over the net fighting over the controls of such cams at Jenny's :-)
  • Now, where was it? Ah, yes! The Truman Show. :) Right at the start, they had flies with cameras mounted on them.

    Seriously, though, this brings up a number of privacy issues. Sub-miniature, mobile, remotely-operable and/or self-navigating cameras could raise a number of privacy issues. From size alone, they'd be very difficult to detect by eye.

  • Privacy (Score:1)

    by CSC ( 31551 )
    We already had GnuGP and ipchains; now FlySwat?
  • This is another article like all the rest posted on slashdot about people being able to do surveillance on anyone else at anytime....Spooky. ALso interesting that their seems to be trend (or not) where scientific discovery starts with an old saying, "Fly on the wall for just one day"....of course I would imagine the Porn industry will love this new way of gettting live video feeds........
  • Imagine being able to film a seen from 1000 angles at once - any angle - without any trusses!
    That'll be as soon as we get their gigatic cameras down to the size of a fly. But still with some (very) intelligent interpolation, you could proably build a decent 3d model on the fly.
    (pun unintened :)
  • Already on it big boy. We're in testing now on "compost cam" where we mount cameras on flies and cockroaches to see what's hap'nin' in the pile.

    Experimentally, we've loaded one heap with a bunch of scraps from hispanically oriented cuisine in hopes that we'll discover "Spanish Fly."

    Once we learn to either train/control the flies or have a viable mechanical counterpart we'll be able to contract behind the scenes for GLOW and WWWF events, or your neighbor's teen-age daughter's slumber party.

    We're getting seed money from Stephen S. in Hollywood (among others) with mumblings about a rash of Ed Wood remakes. We hope to go public in about a year or so.

    --

  • Yes, but aerodynamically a dragonfly is much different than a fly. Granted adding two additional wings changes that aerodynamic as well.

    My guess is that the more likely reason is that it was given the name 'fly' because it is roughly that size. Either that or the naval personel have a hard time saying words with more than one syllable.
  • Hmm, I wonder if the White House got ventilation shafts :-)
  • I think a dragonfly's wings all do different things, whereas I took it that the fly's four all did the same thing as each other.

    I dunno.
    I bet they weren't that impressed by Robocop 2 or 3, or the series. They were crap
  • That would set the big brother factor down a notch. Make RoboFlyBot RoboFly-Powered RoboFly-Hunting Robot. It'd be like transformers, robots hunting robots. They could even recycle the roboflies to make more predators... mmm... pretty cool.
  • Well yeah - I mean there's absolutely a concern about spying. If you can fit a camera on a fly? Of course! Audio too, I imagine.

    But ingenuity will prevail in the end, I think. People will develop wearable flydars that will beep whenever any small objects fly near you. And then the flies will get more stealthy... And the flydar people will think of something else... And so on and so on.

    I'm just going to get a pet frog :)

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • Arent the dragonflys aerodynamics what inspired helicopters? Just thought I heard that somewhere...
  • The fly with four wings puzzled me at first, too. But here's what I think happened:

    1. They needed to study a flying thing. Supposition: 2 wings should be less complicated than 4 wings. Eventually, a fly is decided on.

    2. A fly is studied. A theory on how it flies is arrived at.

    3. In trying to build a fly construct (three different wing motions that, taken together, create backspin and air vortices that create lift) it is discovered that 4 wings will be needed.

    I guess pretty soon all my fellow cypherpunks will be emitting hourly EMP blasts around their homes, just to maintain a little privacy. Of course, I'm assuming EMP will affect these things (or at least the listening/recording devices attached to them) and that they're not already in use by clandestine TLA's. I suppose I'll be visiting Radio Shack after work. (Not that I have anything to hide.)

    Anybody physically checked the remains of any flies they've swatted, lateley? If you were designing one of these, would you include small containers of fake fly blood in your eavesdropping robofly? Seems logical...

    Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
    --
  • Read more next time.. ;-P

    Robofly will weigh about 43 milligrams -- roughly the weight of a fat housefly. Its body will be made of paper-thin stainless steel and its wings of Mylar, which looks and feels a lot like Saran Wrap.

    ``Instead of gears and cogs and cams, we're using pieces that are more like origami,'' Dickinson said.

    Robofly will be powered by the sun, and a tiny device called a piezoelectric actuator will flap its four puny wings 180 times a second.
  • Actually, the algorithm that ants use to explore their surroundings and find the shortest paths to food is based on reinforcement learning, not fuzzy logic. There's a good paper by Subramanian, Druschel and Chen on how this relates to dynamic network routing. Here's [rice.edu] a link. And here's [rice.edu] the follow up.

  • Fly? (Score:3)

    by NickHolland ( 91075 ) on Wednesday November 03, 1999 @04:42AM (#1567491)
    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.
  • Will it really fly? I saw a demonstration of a minature helicopter (about the size of this robofly) at Stanford a few weeks ago. They can create the necessary lift, but the big problem is control. Control not just in the sense of being able to tell it where to go, but at a more basic level -- a matter of system stability (e.g. real helicopters need complex control systems to keep them stable). The reporter may have missed this, and thought that by 'control', the scientists just meant being able to tell the fly where to go.
  • Someone else (fairmang) here was kind enough to provide some hard numbers as to how much power would be available. His conclusion was 1mw. And that has to be divied up on that list of sub-systems (which was the point of the list, the things this tiny amount of power would have to do).

    Processor: 1mw is a very small amount of power for a processor. For reference, I believe some of the Pentium II class chips are running around 15W. 15,000 times as much. Not a whole lot can be done with 1mw of power other than your watch. Keep in mind, your watch isn't trying to keep its own weight in mid-air, but rather just counting the oscilations of a quartz crystal.

    A 1mw transmitter is a very small amount of power OUTPUT for a radio transmitter, and transmitter circuits aren't particularly efficient.

    As for propulsion, gyros are a means of orientation and perhaps navigation, not propulsion (unless, perhaps, they are off balance!). Assuming all the 1mw of power went into propulsion, at near 100% efficiency (HA!), I doubt it could fight the thermal drafts around it, assuming it got airborn (a helium baloon tied to it might help it combat gravity...). Think about trying to fight the thermal drafts around a lightbulb...putting out thousands of times the energy our fly has available to keep it on or near course.

    Anyone with an aeronautical engineering background know if there is some minimum energy expenditure required to keep an object of weight X aloft? (There would be more to the calculation than just weight, obviously) Or to fight a (say) 0.05m/s headwind? (My background is Electrical Eng...I can say with authority that 1mw of power is very, very little for the electronics. I can't say with authority that 1mw is currently or theoretically sufficient or insufficient to levitate this thing) If so, this thing could possibly be proven to be impossible as presented OR possible, given sufficiently efficient parts.


    The thing might actually come close to being possible with near-term technology if instead of trying to have it generate or carry its own power, it were to be powered by an external radio signal -- the mylar wings could be used as a radio antenna. Feed it with a powerful, high-frequency radio source (a microwave oven magnetron would be close to the right frequency, at least in the neighborhood), you could extract enough power from this antenna as you needed, assuming you 1) kept the wings oriented properly to the radio source (going directly towards or away from the radio source) and 2) didn't mind frying things in line with the power supply's output.

    >People who say that it can't be done should not interfere with those that are doing it
    Point well taken. That's a phrase I live by. I would not care if they are working with their own money, or with the money of investors who have volenteered to put it into this project. However, they are working on what, from what I can see, is very likely a thermodynamically impossible project on tax payer money. I'm not really happy about that idea. I'm more concerned about that then I am about any potential spying that this thing could ever do in my life time.

    I wouldn't mind if they were working on pure research which *might* some day lead to a robofly, and after it gets airborn, wouldn't it be cool if they could control it, and then add a camera, and a transmitter... but that's not what they are saying. They said it would be hopefully flying in 2004, and the person who sold the Navy on this admitted that he didn't even know how a biological fly flies at the time he commited to the time schedule. For someone like that to say commit to a project like that just sounds too close to fraud to me.

    Waste and corruption in government? Who would have guessed? (Yes, I realize $2.5M is small peanuts in the overall scheme of things)

    Nick.
  • I agree with your observation. Therefore, I think it's time to start investing heavily on personal EM jamming technology. After all, what good are spy cams if they can't broadcast? Nada. Also, bug (hehe, literally!) detectors for the individual will become increasingly important, I think.

    After reading what Bruce Schneier, Scott McNeally, and David Brin have to say about privacy in the future (i.e., that it won't exist), it's easy to get depressed, and I do. It is impossible to stop the march of technology, which includes spying technology. But let us not forget that it also includes anti-intelligence technology. So, lets have those jammers, encryption, and bug dectectors, stat!

    Oh, one nitpick. I believe the author you are refering to was Foucoult, not Kafka.
  • It was The Fifth Element,

    It was used to spy on the president by Gary Oldmans character...

  • Will soon be standard elements of basic computer security.

    Kooky!

  • They will transmit (or, if neccessary to avoid radio detection, physically 'download') data to a larger, less-mobile but more powerful 'queen bee', which will then broadcast (or whatever) the data to another location. If neccessary you could have a series of queens linked together over a long distance with discrete 'swarms' of roboflys (bugs).

  • That's not necessarily so bad. You yourself are running on only 100W or so- do the calorie count. So probaby a milliwatt is around the scale an actual fly runs at! The reason we don't see flying plants probably has more to do with lack of evolutionary imperative than energy difficulties. We see very few carnivorous plants, yet that's a very simple adaptation- the design of a venus flytrap is nothing compared to most of nature- and costs no significant amount of energy. My guess would be that the flies are going to rest, store up a small amount of battery power, then fly. That's all that would be needed for spying; usually, you could transport the flies yourself to the region you wanted them to watch, after all.

  • I would imagine our culture would just adapt to the idea of being always visible (once again?) Most people are already kind of bored with "America's Funniest Home Videos", after all, and seldom stay very interested in webcams for long. No reason I have to care that someone is able to see my every movement.

    More sinister types of orwellian mass surveillance will not, I think, be aided by this, at least for long. The big problem in spying now isn't gathering information, it's processing the incredible amounts of info that can easily be gathered. If the FBI had 24-hour video of everyone in the US, all the time, how would they make any use of it? And as these devices became cheap, their own activities would become public- and they're far more afraid of that then we are.

    The one activity that would really be aided would be obsessive stalking. But I think culture would adapt to that too... there have been many successful cultures with far less privacy than ours (any primitive village), and others with far more. Humanity is quite capable of adapting to this.

  • Having just finished Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age", I find this vaguely disturbing ...
  • Or if they come out with RoboSlug, we could reuse the SlogBot to harness them out. But I don't think the decomposing of RoboSlug will produce gases needed to power SlugBot!

    Or we could have a RoboSpider that makes webs to catch RoboFlys. This would be the counter-measure of the RoboFly.

    Image "RoboInsect Wars", where you control the insects and you fight it out. This could be better than Quake!



    Steven Rostedt
  • In the article, they also mention the Robopike. Here is a link to the robopike page at MIT.

    http://web.mit.edu/towtank/www/pike/

    And robotuna! A full-size craft for humans on the same foil concept.

    http://web.mit.edu/towtank/www/tuna/brad/tuna.ht ml

    --
  • the surveillance industry is in for a big windfall as long as advances like these keep up. just imagine counter roboflies that seek out possible roboflies and destroys them on sight. we could have a miniature world war going on with surveillance counter surveillance tech like this . hmm I want the movie rights to this.
  • I feel this is going to be a new trend in technology. Every time you have some advancement in technology you also have a countermeasure. Like radar guns and radar detectors. I'm sure that if these are used for spying, someone will come out with some sort of jamming device. Although spying can be a big problem, another thing that worries me more, is using these as weapons. Imagine if they simulate a RoboBee, that carries a poison stinger capable of killing. Forget about nature's "killer bees" I'm now worried about man kind's "killer RoboBees". This can take warfare to a new direction.

    What was that movie with Tom Selek and Gene Simmonds? With all the killer robotics.

    Steven Rostedt
  • With a dog pod grid of course!

  • Exactly!

    I read that book many years ago and loved it. Unfortunately, Amazon.com lists it as being out of print.

    For those who aren't familiar with the story, the basic plot was that Danny (ick, I hate how books targeted for young readers have to have young characters) has a scientist friend who has created a robotic dragonfly. Danny gets to play around with it, and there's some sort of adventure plot line. It is controled through some virtual reality environment that includes tactile feedback. There's one scene where the dragonfly gets stuck in honey, and Danny feels all sticky.

    Essentailly, it's a really cool idea. It has massive privacy issues, but the technology is just a matter of time.

    As usual, science fiction preceeds science fact.
  • What will they think of next... Robo-Ali stings like a bee, floats like a fly? they've GOT be some dodgy issues with mouting a camera on this tiny little big thing surely.. where's privacy in this world?
  • Comment seems to be divided between 'that's really cool!' and 'but what of the privacy risks?' I have the ideal solution--only let me and my friends use flycams. We would only use them for Good, you see...
  • 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.

    Totally agree.

    I *really* have trouble imagining a solar power collection system providing enough power to actually make it fly.

    I understand your point, but I believe that this can actually be done. Think of the wings as solar panels, They probably be big enough to collect the energy needed. I also don't see plants walking around, and I have seen solar powered robots, so I don't agree with your argument.

    • Processor The faster the processors today, the less power it takes to operate them. I can see how nanochips can be used here (although 20 years or more from now).
    • Propulsion System Some sort of gyro system will probably be used. This was stated in the article, and will probably be very efficient.
    • Video camera This could be the main problem, and a good point. But it will only need to transmit the signals that the camera picks up. I would assume that this would not even have to convert to digital, just send the analog signal. But I'm not sure about this.
    • Transmiter I stated this in the last bullet. This and the camera will probably work together. And obviously be short range. You could have another device picking up the signals and amplifying them.
    • Receiver Probably some sort of device that can be manipulated by external signals. Not actually a receiver that converts the signals to commands, but maybe the processor can be effected by some external signal that would change the direction of the flight. Of course this could then be susceptible to noise, but I'm sure they'll come up with something.
    • Some kind of energy storage system I don't think this is too much a problem. I have a solar powered watch that makes it through the night ;)

    fortune statement : "People who say that it can't be done should not interfere with those that are doing it"

    Steven Rostedt
  • Customer: Waiter, what's this fly doing in my soup?

    Waiter: Looks like he's filming you sir.

    It's just not as funny.


  • Actually I think there's a real good possibility that it could fly on solar power. There's already a rather large R&D plane that flies by solar power. The thing has an enormous wing span and is designed to stay aloft up in the higher atmosphere for extended periods of time. Of course, the fact that the top of the wings are covered in solar cells helps.

    While digging around Discovery Online (I believe it was a Discovery program that I saw the plane on -- yes it was flying) I came across this story http://www.discovery.com/stories/technology/microp lanes/microplanes.html [discovery.com] which has some info about the current state of flying spies. It didn't seem that anyone in those projects felt that solar would be the final solution. The equipment used in these devices isn't small enough for the RoboFly, but who knows how much they could eventually scale them. There's some video footage of what the current camera is capable of.

    Anyway, the point is that I figure they could fly it with solar power, but I don't know how much else they could get. There's not much surface area to cover.

    Of course, since it's "...will be powered..." I doubt they know how they'd do it. Probably hoping there's a way when they get there :)

    Chris
  • Why not have a RoboPigeon that goes in behind the RoboFly and deploys some of that IP transmission "dust"?

  • In the article, they say "...the aerodynamic principles that keep 747s aloft do not work on such a small a scale." And the article on Micrplanes agrees when they say "...Aerodynamics aren't proportional like mechanical miniaturization..."

    Why not? If you could, in theory, take everything in a plane a 747 scale it down (jet engine and all) why would it not fly a scale distance?

    How small can we make cameras these days? Enough resolution for an AI chip to recognize objects and fly around (pretending for a moment that we could do image recognition of that quality, although the Mars lander did)

  • Man, you thought regular flies were annoying? While until you get BORG fly buzzing around your head. You swat at him.. hit him.. and he burns a friggin' hole in your hand.

    "Buzzzzz... resistance is futile. We *WILL* fly up your nose and annoy the beegeezus out of you until kingdom come. (Buzz.)"

    --
  • As long as they're making them out of steel and mylar, magnetic countermeasures would work nicely, especially inside one's home. You could have magnetic "bug lights", and magnetic protection around the major openings in your residence to nab
    'em when they fly in.

    Of course, sooner or later someone would develop predatory flyers to hover on station over a given zone and take out the nosy little nasties.

  • Needed feature: gyroscopically stablized camera (Score:3)

    by johnhebert ( 53732 ) on Wednesday November 03, 1999 @03:01AM (#1567527)
    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.

  • But they might not nessecarily need to reduce their cameras. Just transmit the image. Have one or two 'good' cameras that will take good images of the entire thing. Then have these flies getting images of all over. Use the flies' images as maps and the good cameras as the images, combine the two and you could probably end up with a film that really can be considered 3d. Then you could allow for the broadcast of the movie from any angle. Or even maybe selectable angles. Yeah having the couple good cameras could be a pain to get stuff right but I'd think you could produce something good with less than perfect cameras at every position.
    -cpd
  • just think, with a little work on miniaturizing these things, we could have robot fleas for Aibo
    ^. .^
  • Suppose they design a fully-working robotic SpyFly, one with good resolution (if not necessarily field-of-view) and stealth. 'suppose then that it manages to pop by, say, Saddam's residence-of-the-day.

    How do they get the information *out*? Does it just store a small number of images, and have to fly back to be recovered, or does it transmit over radio (and thus increase the risk of detection?)

    I'm not up on bugging technology, obviously. Anybody here follow that sort of stuff?

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