Ceilidh

Michael Zey
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Researchers here are quite confident that they can solve the aerodynamics problems," said Tony Trueman, a spokesman for Bath University, in south-west England, adding that spy cameras and computers small enough to equip an insect were already within reach.

The university has received a 650,000-pound (910,000 euros, 1.15 million dollars) grant from BAE Systems, the British government and the US Air Force, and "in around the next 18 months the project will be finished," Trueman said.
He said the military could use insect-sized drones for "the sensing of chemical and biological weapons, but they are not likely to be used directly as weapons," because they would be too small to carry a bomb.
They could, however, "land on the roof of enemy vehicles and mark them for future attack."
Civil authorities might use them for "traffic monitoring, border surveillance, fire and rescue operation, wildlife survey, substance detection like in a sort of nuclear accident," he said, adding: "You can send these into the building."
The head of the aerospace subgroup at the university's department of mechanical engineering, Ismet Gursul, said: "We're looking for the most efficient way of flying, and the rapid flapping of a flexible wing is one of these."
Trueman said several miniature drones existed in the United States "but they can only fly for a few seconds and a few meters" and American researchers were "beginning to know that a wing should be flexible and not rigid and it is more efficient that way."


The university researchers hoped to build a drone about 15 centimetres (six inches) long, weighing 50 grammes (less than two ounces) and capable of flying for an hour.


But Gursul noted that existing models were "too large to carry out fine manoeuvres" and said the ultimate aim was to construct a plane no larger than a bee, three or four centimetres long.


The basic obstacle was one of aerodynamics, he said, because "the smaller an aircraft is made, the slower is its speed and the more vulnerable it is to high winds."


According to Trueman, equipping the plane posed less of a problem because "miniaturisation gets easier" as computers become more powerful.


"Other scientists must come up with a method of miniaturising the computer hardware and software, so one would be able to put on to the plane, so the plane can fly in an intelligent way, so it doesn't strike objects," he said
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