[Infowarrior] - Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs.

[Richard Forno]

The mesh/net/matrix of surveillance expands even further.....but no, we're
not creating a nation of paranoid citizens, are we?

-rf


Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs.

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 9, 2007; A03

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/08/AR2007100801
434_pf.html

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette
Square last month.

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from
New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They
looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are
not insects."

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

"I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said.
"They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that
alive?' "

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar
sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the
insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the
Department of Homeland Security.

Others think they are, well, dragonflies -- an ancient order of insects that
even biologists concede look about as robotic as a living creature can look.

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of
U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some
federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in
them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling
their flight muscles remotely.

The robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate
the crannies of collapsed buildings to find survivors.

The technical challenges of creating robotic insects are daunting, and most
experts doubt that fully working models exist yet.

"If you find something, let me know," said Gary Anderson of the Defense
Department's Rapid Reaction Technology Office.

But the CIA secretly developed a simple dragonfly snooper as long ago as the
1970s. And given recent advances, even skeptics say there is always a chance
that some agency has quietly managed to make something operational.

"America can be pretty sneaky," said Tom Ehrhard, a retired Air Force
colonel and expert in unmanned aerial vehicles who is now at the Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonprofit Washington-based research
institute.

Robotic fliers have been used by the military since World War II, but in the
past decade their numbers and level of sophistication have increased
enormously. Defense Department documents describe nearly 100 different
models in use today, some as tiny as birds, and some the size of small
planes.

All told, the nation's fleet of flying robots logged more than 160,000
flight hours last year -- a more than fourfold increase since 2003. A recent
report by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College warned that if
traffic rules are not clarified soon, the glut of unmanned vehicles "could
render military airspace chaotic and potentially dangerous."

But getting from bird size to bug size is not a simple matter of making
everything smaller.

"You can't make a conventional robot of metal and ball bearings and just
shrink the design down," said Ronald Fearing, a roboticist at the University
of California at Berkeley. For one thing, the rules of aerodynamics change
at very tiny scales and require wings that flap in precise ways -- a huge
engineering challenge.

Only recently have scientists come to understand how insects fly -- a
biomechanical feat that, despite the evidence before scientists' eyes, was
for decades deemed "theoretically impossible." Just last month, researchers
at Cornell University published a physics paper clarifying how dragonflies
adjust the relative motions of their front and rear wings to save energy
while hovering.

That kind of finding is important to roboticists because flapping fliers
tend to be energy hogs, and batteries are heavy.

The CIA was among the earliest to tackle the problem. The "insectothopter,"
developed by the agency's Office of Research and Development 30 years ago,
looked just like a dragonfly and contained a tiny gasoline engine to make
the four wings flap. It flew but was ultimately declared a failure because
it could not handle crosswinds.

Agency spokesman George Little said he could not talk about what the CIA may
have done since then. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence,
the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service also declined to
discuss the topic.

Only the FBI offered a declarative denial. "We don't have anything like
that," a spokesman said.

The Defense Department is trying, though.

In one approach, researchers funded by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) are inserting computer chips into moth pupae -- the
intermediate stage between a caterpillar and a flying adult -- and hatching
them into healthy "cyborg moths."

The Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems project aims to create
literal shutterbugs -- camera-toting insects whose nerves have grown into
their internal silicon chip so that wranglers can control their activities.
DARPA researchers are also raising cyborg beetles with power for various
instruments to be generated by their muscles.

"You might recall that Gandalf the friendly wizard in the recent classic
'Lord of the Rings' used a moth to call in air support," DARPA program
manager Amit Lal said at a symposium in August. Today, he said, "this
science fiction vision is within the realm of reality."

A DARPA spokeswoman denied a reporter's request to interview Lal or others
on the project.

The cyborg insect project has its share of doubters.

"I'll be seriously dead before that program deploys," said vice admiral Joe
Dyer, former commander of the Naval Air Systems Command, now at iRobot in
Burlington, Mass., which makes household and military robots.

By contrast, fully mechanical micro-fliers are advancing quickly.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have made a "microbat
ornithopter" that flies freely and fits in the palm of one's hand. A
Vanderbilt University team has made a similar device.

With their sail-like wings, neither of those would be mistaken for insects.
In July, however, a Harvard University team got a truly fly-like robot
airborne, its synthetic wings buzzing at 120 beats per second.

"It showed that we can manufacture the articulated, high-speed structures
that you need to re-create the complex wing motions that insects produce,"
said team leader Robert Wood.

The fly's vanishingly thin materials were machined with lasers, then folded
into three-dimensional form "like a micro-origami," he said. Alternating
electric fields make the wings flap. The whole thing weighs just 65
milligrams, or a little more than the plastic head of a push pin.

Still, it can fly only while attached to a threadlike tether that supplies
power, evidence that significant hurdles remain.

In August, at the International Symposium on Flying Insects and Robots, held
in Switzerland, Japanese researchers introduced radio-controlled fliers with
four-inch wingspans that resemble hawk moths. Those who watch them fly, its
creator wrote in the program, "feel something of 'living souls.' "

Others, taking a tip from the CIA, are making fliers that run on chemical
fuels instead of batteries. The "entomopter," in early stages of development
at the Georgia Institute of Technology and resembling a toy plane more than
a bug, converts liquid fuel into a hot gas, which powers four flapping wings
and ancillary equipment.

"You can get more energy out of a drop of gasoline than out of a battery the
size of a drop of gasoline," said team leader Robert Michelson.

Even if the technical hurdles are overcome, insect-size fliers will always
be risky investments.

"They can get eaten by a bird, they can get caught in a spider web," said
Fearing of Berkeley. "No matter how smart you are -- you can put a Pentium
in there -- if a bird comes at you at 30 miles per hour there's nothing you
can do about it."

Protesters might even nab one with a net -- one of many reasons why Ehrhard,
the former Air Force colonel, and other experts said they doubted that the
hovering bugs spotted in Washington were spies.

So what was seen by Crane, Alarcon and a handful of others at the D.C. march
-- and as far back as 2004, during the Republican National Convention in New
York, when one observant but perhaps paranoid peace-march participant
described on the Web "a jet-black dragonfly hovering about 10 feet off the
ground, precisely in the middle of 7th avenue . . . watching us"?

They probably saw dragonflies, said Jerry Louton, an entomologist at the
National Museum of Natural History. Washington is home to some large,
spectacularly adorned dragonflies that "can knock your socks off," he said.

At the same time, he added, some details do not make sense. Three people at
the D.C. event independently described a row of spheres, the size of small
berries, attached along the tails of the big dragonflies -- an accoutrement
that Louton could not explain. And all reported seeing at least three
maneuvering in unison.

"Dragonflies never fly in a pack," he said.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice said her group
is investigating witness reports and has filed Freedom of Information Act
requests with several federal agencies. If such devices are being used to
spy on political activists, she said, "it would be a significant violation
of people's civil rights."

For many roboticists still struggling to get off the ground, however, that
concern -- and their technology's potential role -- seems superfluous.

"I don't want people to get paranoid, but what can I say?" Fearing said.
"Cellphone cameras are already everywhere. It's not that much different."