UAV / UCAV - Drohnen

[Quintus Fabius]

Hier noch mal was zu Mikro-Drohnen auf Basis von lebenden Insekten (Cyborg-Drohnen) welche etliche Probleme von Mikro-Drohnen lösen, insbesondere die Frage der Energieversorgung und der Beweglichkeit usw einleitend ein Film:

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“It's much easier to commandeer an insect's nervous system than a dog's or a human's”

In her 2014 book Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts, author Emily Anthes details experiments designed to breed, augment and engineer living creatures, from cloned sheep to cyborg rats to fish designed to glow in the dark.

Experiments like the cyborg cat might have been conducted in secrecy (the plan was only revealed in 2001, when a former CIA officer spoke to the UK’s Daily Telegraph), but other research has taken place in public. In 2006, DARPA published a notice soliciting “Hybrid Insect MEMS (HI-MEMS)” on a publicly-accessible “Federal Business Opportunities” site. “MEMS” are “micro-electromechanical systems.” It was an open call for insect cyborgs.

I asked Anthes why she thought the military was so keen to work with insects. “I'd imagine there are several reasons,” she said. “Firstly those creatures are simpler to work with, biologically speaking. It's much easier to commandeer an insect's nervous system than a dog's or a human's. But also, for the specific applications they were imagining, I believe they wanted small, inconspicuous animals.”

The reasoning behind their call was also similar to that behind the Acoustic Kitty decades earlier: technology piggybacking on an already-living, remote control “insect drone” would be easier than building a robot from scratch. In this case, the creature would have the advantage of natural flight.

A chapter of Frankenstein’s Cat is given to what followed DARPA’s open call. Anthes visits the team led by electrical engineer Michel Maharbiz at the University of California, Berkeley, which has successfully turned the Mecynorrhina torquata (flower beetle) into a DARPA-funded flying machine. First they anaesthetized the beetle in a freezer, then punctured its exoskeleton and threaded steel wire into its brain and basalar muscles, which regulated its wings. Connecting the wires to an insect ‘backpack’ crammed with a circuit board, a battery and a tiny radio receiver, the system could be used to shock the beetles into veering left or right during flight, or dropping from the air entirely.

Since then, Maharbiz has developed a newly wireless insect-control system using a neural implant, engineers at Cornell University unveiled a nuclear-powered transponder for use with cyborg insects, and a series of cyborg moths have been created, the latest of which is remote-controlled and was built at North Carolina State University. In the future, it appears, humans might be spared warfare, which will be fought increasingly by swarms of bionic micro-drones.

But Anthes crushes any dreams of a beetle battalion.

“We're pretty far away from a cyborg insect army,” she said. “What scientists have managed to do already is amazing: they can remotely and wirelessly steer insects in mid-air! But the controls are still extremely crude. A lot more work will be required before these insects are ready to be used in the real world, and whether they actually ever get deployed—for military or civilian purposes—is still anyone's guess.”