The Escapist Wrote:Harvard engineers have built a flying insect the size of a coin.
A flying robot about the size of a U.S. Quarter has taken flight in the culmination of a decade long quest. The tiny robot, made of advanced ceramics and tiny actuators with submillimeter scale parts, is colloquially called the RoboBee. Worth noting: It's inspired by, and works more like, fly anatomy. "This is what I have been trying to do for literally the last 12 years," said Robert J. Wood, the Harvard professor heading up the team, "It's really only because of this lab's recent breakthroughs in manufacturing, materials, and design that we have even been able to try this. And it just worked, spectacularly well." Much of the robot's design had to be completely designed from the groud up - there just weren't off-the-shelf parts for something this small. "We had to develop solutions from scratch, for everything," said Wood.
The robot's tiny "flight muscles" are actually Piezoelectric actuators, little strips of ceramic that, when trigged with an electric field, expand and contract. The tiny frame is carbon fiber, and incredibly small plastic hinges embedded in that frame serve as joints. Each wing is controlled independently in real time - to ensure that the robot's rotation doesn't get out of hand. The team can also prototype more rapidly than ever, because they've pioneered a layered, laser cut manufacturing technique that allows them to fold the robot together out of a sheet like a pop up book. Overall, the tiny robot packs a ton of innovation into a tiny space, and there's more to come. RoboBee's temporary limitation is power - it trails a little power cord everwhere it goes, so new batteries are in order.
Small, dense batteries are just one part of the puzzle, though. Teams across the university are working on the other pieces of RoboBee - tiny robot brains, swarm programming, and research into insect behavior. The end goal is a swarm of cooperative, independent flying bugs that can relay video or pictures. Ideally, those bugs could be used to track climate data or search for missing persons.
And this is how liberty dies...with flying insects. Suddenly cyberpunk turns into a grim prophecy of tomorrow. Or maybe I'm just seeing the bad possible applications of this technology
As much as I would like to believe in humanity, we did invent a way to blow up entire cities using plutonium and uranium before we started making energy out of them
Basically these things sound like slightly (okay, incredibly) larger things than what Ryk E. Spoor had the protagonist using in Boundary and Threshold.
In those novels, the little nano-bugs were used for good purposes. Unfortunately, I agree with Mickk and r3vange that chances are, someone in our society will end up using them for purposes that aren't wonderful.
Heck, think about it simply from the perspective of what we as pathetic nerds would do - you can't tell me that you wouldn't take one of these with a camera mounted and fly it through the vent shafts in your local high school to see all those hot cheerleaders in the shower. (And that's just me remembering from back in my college days when we took a remote control helicopter with a camera mounted under it and spied on the women's dorm.)
Now carry that on to the next level - what would happen to government secrets if someone could fly in a micro-bug and listen in to the top secret conversations regarding national security? What would the results be if (just to pick a historical example and play with it a bit) if Britain had had a bug in the German chancellory in 1939 and found that Hitler was prepared to pull back from Poland if he'd run into trouble? Or if instead of having to listen to Bill Clinton say 'I did not have sex with that woman', if there had been a video of him getting a Lewinsky come out as proof that he DID have sex with that woman?
There was a science fiction story written ages ago, and I can't remember who wrote it now or what the title was, but the gist of it was, a scientist ended up inventing a remote viewing device. You were able to watch anywhere else on the planet - and any WHEN else, too, if it was in the past. The comment made by one of the generals in the book was, "With this device, we could scrap our early warning system - just aim of these at their control center and see when they're about to launch."
(11-21-2013, 12:53 PM)Jihadjoe Wrote: Oh god... The end of days... Agmen agreed with me.
They do have that potential, though surely something this small is very susceptible to counter devices? Something like interference or small bursts of electromagnetic radiation in confined spaces?
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