A team of researchers for Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States of America might have now been able to create small robotic drones that can hover for longer than 1000 seconds, or for approximately 100 times than what the record in the institute in previous experiments is.
In the course of these acrobatic maneuvers such as double piloting in the air, these robotic insects, which weigh much less than a paper clip (several grams), fly much faster than the drones of equivalent size.
Amazing design
The new robotic drones, which are built to improve precision and agility in the flight and reduce the mechanical stress on the artificial wings, increasingly improve flight precision and agility, increase endurance, and increase the drone life, institute officials said in an official press release.
And the new design also has enough room for a battery or a small sensor that the drone can fly itself away from the lab.
The drone still requires wires to power it, but scientists are developing mini batteries and sensors so that the real world version can literally fly on its own.
An open-access paper on the new design was published by the researchers in the journal Science Robotics, which suggests that with increased lifespan and accuracy of this robot, it might not be long before we utilize it for some noble tasks like artificial plant pollination.
Various uses
Numbers of bees and other pollinators are indeed falling, researchers say, because of climate change and other reasons — and if bees are not pollinating, many crops would not grow, putting food supply at risk.
In these terms, robotic insects could pollinate plants on farms or even space colonies. Other applications of these small drones include search for people trapped under the debris of collapsed buildings in case of major earth quakes. These drones could be used by scientists to study plants and the wildlife more easily and accurately.
Indeed, the potential scientific applications of such inventions, however, go only so far; at some point, a team of scientists fears they will have a military twist to them, if they haven't done already.
Extremely dangerous
These tiny robots are real insects, can fly through windows, holes or cracks in the wall to enter the neighbor territory unnoticed, then gather intelligence, observing a neighbor’s movements, conversations and security settings, thanks to cameras and microphones.
In the context, these flying insects can track enemy soldiers, vehicles and weapons; they can, for instance, attach small tracking devices to valuable targets to point missiles or special operations to them.
Swarm capabilities mean that these small drones can work together in high coordination and hence, these small drones can carry precise explosives as offensive weapons to be used as well, with the help of artificial intelligence tools.
Now, scientists fear that any further development within the ranges of drones and artificial intelligence, even if it comes without the slightest touch of war, will only foam the conflict that already rages between several countries to develop and collect advanced weapons based on said technologies, which shows them worshipping and blindly following a race, where the world has seen an accelerated growth of nuclear weapons in many countries, with the US and the USSR as spearhead.
