Small robotic drones to join Air Force's arsenal
Micro Air Vehicles, or MAVs, will add surveillance capabilities to the military and law enforcements; scientists have studied the flight of fruit flies, the crawling of insects, and the perching of birds as they look for ideas for smaller and more effective surveillance machines, and MAVs are one result of these studies
A recent official U.S. Air Force animated video looks — and feels — like a futuristic arcade game: Bad guys of indiscernible origin being shadowed, from a careful distance, by small robotic drones designed to resemble birds and insects. When one of the bad guys opens his apartment door, a tiny robo-bug, looking like a garage door opener with wings, sneaks in to spy. In another scene, a bug — the Air Force calls them Micro Air Vehicles, or MAVs — creeps into a sniper’s roost and delivers a deadly shot to the back of his head. The Chicago Tribune’s Aamer Madhani writes that it might sound far-fetched, but that top Air Force officials believe that MAVs could be a significant part of the Defense Department’s arsenal in the not-so-distant future.
Civilian researchers and airmen at the Air Force Research Laboratory, based at this installation just outside Dayton, have set a 2015 deadline to roll out the first generation of MAVs. This first group, they hope, will be the size of birds and be able to operate several days without recharging. “These are one of the assets that in the future could be a game-changer,” said Mark Lewis, chief scientist of the U.S. Air Force.
For more than a decade, the Pentagon and the aerospace industry have poured tens of millions of dollars into research surrounding tiny flying machines that officials say could be an invaluable help in battle and rescue operations. Scientists have studied the flight of fruit flies, the crawling of insects, and the perching of birds as they look for ideas on how to build an aircraft that is light enough to be carried in a soldier’s rucksack but durable enough to stay aloft for long periods (see, for example, 18 September 2007 HS Daily Wire story).
U.S. forces and their allies have already used some small vehicles in the field, but nothing that compares in size and stealth to what scientists at the Air Force lab are looking to develop in coming years. Britain’s Special Forces have tested a 28-inch-long MAV, called the Wasp, on reconnaissance missions in Afghanistan. Last year, the U.S. Marines placed a $19.3 million order for the small unmanned aircraft, developed by California-based AeroVironment. The Wasp can be fitted with explosives that could theoretically be used for a surprise attack.
The U.S. military relies on large unmanned aerial vehicles
