Tiny Flyer Navigates Like Fly

Assassin bug writes to tell us the Discovery Channel is reporting on a new ultralight autonomous aircraft that could be the next 'fly on the wall'. From the article: "The 10-gram microflyer, being developed by a team of researchers lead by Dario Floreano at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, has a 36-centimeter (14-inch) wingspan. But it could one day be shrunk to insect size and used for search and rescue."

search and rescue?

[jszep]

or search and destroy?

Sounds eerily familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

The designers were apparently Danny Dunn devotees in their youths. Can a time machine be far behind?

Metrics

[Bollux]

I like how the author converts 7m x 7m into 75ft by 75ft. Is that how flies see the world?

Easier idea

[Dr. Eggman]

Why build a fancy flight system to be swatted when we could just take a real fly, attach 2 tiny cameras (four if they're small enough, one for each direction) and a little zapper to zap its brain when it goes the wrong direction we want.

Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that the biggest obstacle to making miniaturized robots useful is not how you guide it but how you power it. The article doesn't address that issue.

Not tiny

[Lord_Dweomer]

Story title is misleading. At 14", this is NOT tiny. It is on par with small toy airplanes.

Am I the only one tired of these science stories that sound cool...but then you read them and get to the part where they say "and one day in the distant future...asuminig we get funding which is the whole reason for this press release....we could POSSIBLY do X, Y and Z with this!"

Seriously...every time I read one of these and get to the "punchline" at the end I feel like I've been had for 2 minutes of my life.

Maybe 1000 years from now.....

[garrett714]

But this thing is a plane, so it's a bad choice. It's not much use in the great outdoors if it's very small, because the lightest gust of wind is going to send it 50' off course. Besides, the need to maintain forward progress to ensure lift is going to make a fixed-wing aircraft a tool of limited use, except maybe for buzzing drunk schoolmates at the annual picnic.

I completely agree. Flies move by flapping their wings at a high speed, allowing for quick changes in direction and such. Fixed wing aircraft require forward momentum along with changes to control surfaces in order to change direction. The problem with a fixed wing aircraft that is the size of a fly is that not just a gust of wind, but even the tiniest ripple in the surrounding air, will cause it to either stall or move off course. Not to mention they would have to miniaturize everything: the propeller, power source, cameras, and all other on board electronics. The article says that it could one day be used for search and rescue but I don't know how an autonomous robot is going to know to look for humans, unless it has an infared sensor which just adds that much more weight. And even then, they would have to have a computer on the airplane that would understand all of this information. And to think, it has a 14" wingspan right now and all it can do is avoid walls! I'm sure the inventor has good intentions and all but this just sounds completely unreasonable to me.