Insect and Nano Insect Drones

Insect drones.

That’s some of the latest on the web; really small insect drones.

No, that’s probably a mock-up of something too far-fetched.

But with labs experimenting with small drones:

And DARPA developing a “Nano Air Vehicle (“an extremely small, ultra lightweight air vehicle system (less than 15 cm and less than 20 grams) with the potential to perform indoor and outdor military missions,” and experimenting with flapping wings)

How far will it be until someone can just purchase a drone like this and fly it anywhere? Of course, the military would get such technology first. 

A New York Times story from June tells of a three-foot long Raven, one of the smallest drones in use on the battlefield.

“There are some 4,800 Ravens in operation in the Army, although plenty get lost. One American service member in Germany recalled how five soldiers and officers spent six hours tramping through a dark Bavarian forest — and then sent a helicopter — on a fruitless search for a Raven that failed to return home from a training exercise. The next month a Raven went AWOL again, this time because of a programming error that sent it south. ‘The initial call I got was that the Raven was going to Africa,’ said the service member, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss drone glitches.”

The Washington Post claimed in 2007 that the CIA “secretly developed a simple dragonfly snooper as long ago as the 1970s”

Harvard has been working on flapping-wing microbots since that story or even earlier. 

“When developing a flying robot on the scale of a common housefly, all hardware must be developed from scratch as there is nothing “off-the-shelf” which can be used for mechanisms, sensors, or computation that would satisfy the extreme mass and power limitations,” its website states.

Share your nano drone discoveries or thoughts below.