ROBOFLY
Study: RoboBee takes flight at 120 wing flaps a second
Dr. Will Dickson of CalTech demonstrates his large-scale RoboFly robot.
Insect Drones
Insect-Eye Camera Offers Wide-Angle Vision for Tiny Drones
The insect-eye camera depends on each individual unit to contribute 1 pixel of resolution. A 180-pixel-resolution camera may not do much right now, but the camera design can scale up its resolution by adding more units to the overall array. Rogers anticipates making camera designs with better resolution than the eyes of praying mantises (15 000 eye units) and dragonflies (28 000 eye units).
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The technology won’t likely be used in consumer digital cameras any
time soon. But the insect-eye cameras could be used in medical devices, such as endoscopes, which give physicians a look inside the human body. Alexander Borst, director of the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, in Germany, envisions commercial versions of the cameras within the next year or two. |
The race is on: Manufacturer sets sights on market for armed drones
Death from a swarm of tiny drones: U.S. Air Force releases terrifying video of tiny flybots that can can hover, stalk and even kill targets
- Air Vehicles Directorate at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, is already developing prototypes of tiny drones that can hover
- The Micro Air Vehicles will work in swarms to provide complex surveillance of a battlefield
- They can also be armed with incapacitating chemicals, combustible payloads or even explosives 'for precision targeting capability'
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The lethal micro-drones that can crawl, hover and perch |
DRAGONLY DRONES
Video: Dragonfly Drones in Flight
More than a few people were skeptical, when the Washington Post picked up on our story about robotic dragonfly spies. The paper quoted eyewitness accounts — but failed to find any agency who would admit to using this type of micro air vehicle. |
Dragonfly Drone Takes Flight
Created by Festo, a leader in pneumatic and electrical automation technology, the BionicOpter is just over 17 inches long and weighs only six ounces. Inside its lightweight aluminum and plastic housing is a
microcontroller that calculates input from onboard sensors and actuators, then translates that data to the servo motors in the wings |
New dragonfly drone can be controlled with a smartphone
Each of the four wings can flap and twist individually and the power of thrust for each wing can be adjusted, allowing it to take on complex maneuvers, but Festo says the drone is easily controlled by a smartphone because flapping frequency, amplitude and installation angle are controlled by software and electronics -- all the controller has to do is steer the dragonfly. The software determines the motion sequences based on the steering.
Read more @: http://www.treehugger.com/gadgets/new-dragonfly-drone-can-be-controlled-smartphone.html |