tracking system

Description

If you research the subject, you will find bee drones, wasp drones, hummingbird drones. This was just a lucky catch at a family outing. ATS shill, take your red pill, and pay your bill. l,p Look up biomimetic robots, too. 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. 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. Dragonfly "Insectothopter," developed by CIA's Office of Research and Development in the 1970s, had a miniature engine to move the wings up and down. A small amount of gas was used to drive the engine. 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. RedIce. Pentagon's new weapon - cyborg flies that are spies * Julian Borger in Washington * The Guardian, Wednesday 15 March 2006 The Pentagon is trying to develop "insect cyborgs" able to sniff out explosives, or "bug" conversations by lurking unseen in enemy hideouts with micro-transmitters strapped to their bodies. How is this for technology imitating nature? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been funding a project by California-based company AeroVironment to create tiny NAVs or Nano Aerial Vehicles. The result is a tiny winged robot that looks like an artificial hummingbird that can be controlled like your average RC aircraft. As you can see by the results demonstrated in the video above, improvements are coming along with the propulsion and control testing for the tiny robotic bird. Eventually AeroVironment is hoping to dress the device up to look like a hummingbird as well as fly like one. The goal of the robo-hummingbird as one could guess would be to have a small discreet surveillance device that could be used perhaps to help uncover enemy combatants hiding in urban settings. Or maybe the tiny flapper could be used in search-and-rescue operations in environments too dangerous for human rescuers to venture. Wired. We have designed a robotic honeybee to mimic the bee dance communication system. To achieve this goal, a tracking system has been developed to extract real bee dance trajectories recorded with high-speed video cameras. The results have been analysed to find the essential properties required for the prototype robot. Putative signals in the dance communication have been identified from the literature. Several prototypes were built with successive addition of more features or improvement of existing components. Prototypes were tested in a populated beehive results were documented using high-speed camera recordings. A substantial innovation is a visual feedback system that helps the robot to minimise collisions with other bees. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Freie Universitaumlt Berlin, Berlin, Germany