I’ve been worrying about this development for decades. Looks like it’s on the doorstep. It won’t just be used by militaries. Just another nail in the coffin of privacy.
I’ve been worrying about this development for decades. Looks like it’s on the doorstep. It won’t just be used by militaries. Just another nail in the coffin of privacy.
How about really strong fans in the area of protection?
How do these mini drones handle heavy rain or just plain old smoke? I suppose there is always netting…
I’m having a hard time believing this. Something that small has little volume for energy storage, and the drag of those drones at 300 MPH will require quite a bit of energy to maintain the velocity.
Right. I doubt “mosquito-sized” drones have enough juice to get to 300 mph, let alone do it for any significant amount of time. Plus, what, with beating wings? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
That doesn’t mean I don’t agree with the main point. Small fast drones have all kinds of negative implications.
They could if they had a 299 mph tailwind.
Having read more of the article, even more so. What it really is is “some of them are really tiny, some are really fast” and so on. The 300+mph ones weigh 3.5lb and the motors are water-cooled. There’s no way the insect-sized ones are fast or have any meaningful flight time. I wouldn’t be surprised if they just exist to deliver a microphone somewhere. And then there’s a 6 inch 1.2 ounce drone that has 30 minutes of flight time.
Etc., etc.
So far, all the very small “drones” I’ve seen were tethered. There just isn’t any way to put the controller, batteries, motors, sensors on such a small thing. Even working with bare chips, the controller is several mm on a side, a camera would be bigger and heavier. Maybe, some time it can be all integrated in a package small enough to be compared to a mosquito, but not yet.
The bigger and medium sized are a real problem. They have optically tethered drones that can unwind 20km of fiber and are immune to simple jamming. On the other hand, the Ukrainians can follow the fiber back to neutralize the controller.
The even bigger problem is that we have to use megabuck missles to shoot down kilobuck drones. It will take a lot of getting used to for for the military establishment that doesn’t even acknowledge that the battle field now has over the horizon weapons that can target individual soldiers for cheap.
When I was at DARPA, I got an earful from a contractor who told me what he really wanted to work on: a bee (a natural, biological bee) equipped with a chip that could control the bee’s movements, and return all kinds of signal intelligence – including audio and video. I found it interesting, if a bit far-fetched. Yesterday I heard that the Chinese have perfected that very thing.
– very small drones with very limited flight radius.
– very fast drones that are large (3.5 lbs.) and likely incredibly noisy.
– largish drones (easily visible if they’re within listening or striking range) with a long endurance.
– un-jammable drones because they’re controlled by fiber optic cable which unwinds, but are limited in what they can carry other than the cable.
The headline prompts you to think that these capabilities are all in one drone, but they aren’t. Pick (at most) one.
And they’re not combining those capabilities in one drone any time soon, since they work directly against each other.