Remember the movies you may have seen with robot bees and insect drones attacking humans? The time has come when this phenomenon is graduating from sci-fi to reality. Insect drones are now commercially available in the Internet. A Swedish firm is accepting pre-orders for its maiden product, Crazyflie Nano. It hopes to start shipping in April 2013. Watch in the Youtube this intrepid 19-gram drone, which fits on the palm of your hand, make precision maneuvers around the legs of a row of bar benches — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WBUVYZkODI.
The bad news is the model is ‘open ended’, meaning, it can easily be converted into a spy-drone equipped with a camera and recorder. It looks like a toy, but it can be deadly.
It can be controlled from a regular laptop using a USB mini-antenna. It is a quadrocopter, meaning, it is powered by four mini-helicopter rotors. It has a 7-minute flight time and needs 20 minutes to have the battery recharged.
There are two models, one with ‘regular’ sensors ($149), another with ‘extra’ sensors ($179), cheaper than a high-end Blackberry. This tiny UAV is ‘completely open source and hackable’, meaning, the sky is the limit in putting add-ons like super-light equipment, and in introducing new software.
The danger of such a tiny but powerful device is it can upgrade war and terrorist technologies in the blink of an eye. Someone has suggested that it can be equipped to extract DNA samples from unsuspecting people. It can potentially carry out assassinations by injecting lethal chemicals. It can peer into and record laptop monitors and extract passwords. It can make hacking obsolete.
If you stretch your imagination a bit, it can plug a light USB on the laptop and extract information or introduce viruses. These are no longer just subject for sci-fi screenplay writers. We are in an age of electronic magic, as well as electronic anarchy and terrorism.
An urban spy drone is in fact already in production, financed by the US government, according to Internet articles. The mini-drone can potentially implant tracking devices on people, enter homes and plant cameras, microphones or even mini-bombs, attach to people’s clothes and detach inside high-security command centers, and receive and transmit extracted emails. The potential war, terrorism, and anti-terrorism uses are endless. It is easy to predict that this will be proliferated by police, military, and terrorist groups.
It can be used for commercial espionage, enter board rooms, record, and transmit real time stockholders’ meetings, record vault codes of banks, and photograph confidential documents. Insect drones are today in its infant stage. But the potential for rapid evolution is there. It can be made lighter, quieter and more invisible, and have longer flying hours. A team of mini-drones can have specialized functions. It can attach itself to chargers when power is waning. The uses are for good and evil.