microdrones

It has recently been reported that the US military has created a micro drone that can enter into people’s houses and spy on you. DARPA an organisation that is responsible for the programme had announced this new wave of micro drones under their Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA)  programme, funded by the USA government.

One of the drone experts Peter W. Singer openly admits to the real causes of these super bugs, and said: “At this point, it doesn’t really matter if you are against the technology, because it’s coming. The miniaturization of drones is where it really gets interesting. You can use these things anywhere, put them anyplace, and the target will never even know they’re being watched.”

However, according to the US Air force (USAF), these micro drones are combined with the ability to harvest energy. The USAF has admitted that with these devices, they will enable insect-sized drone swarms to be dropped from any military aircraft. They have the ability to stay aloft for a prolonged amount of time, offering a host of functions, including, if necessary, assassination.

DARPA’s press release states, “overseas” as the theatre of operation, but it doesn’t take much imagination to see how these micro drones could be applied in the US,  and other western countries, especially amid an increasingly tense urban environment in the wake of confrontations with domestic police and terrorist groups. Yet, the tantalizing application in disaster relief will obviously pave the way for their easy introduction.

DARPA had also admitted that one of the aims of this device is to “give small unmanned aerial vehicles advanced perception and autonomy to rapidly search buildings or other cluttered environments without teleportation. Military teams patrolling dangerous urban environments overseas and rescue teams responding to disasters such as earthquakes or floods currently rely on remotely piloted unmanned aerial vehicles to provide a bird’s-eye view of the situation and spot threats that can’t be seen from the ground. But to know what’s going on inside an unstable building or a threatening indoor space often requires physical entry, which can put troops or civilian response teams in danger.”

It all seems a good idea in concept if it is to save human lives, but we can clearly see that this isn’t going to be the case. This new wave in technology will enable small, unmanned aerial vehicles to quickly navigate a labyrinth of rooms, stairways and corridors or other obstacle-filled environments without a remote pilot.

Mark Micire, DARPA program manager reported, “Birds of prey and flying insects exhibit the kinds of capabilities we want for small UAV’s (unmanned aerial vehicles). Goshawks, for example, can fly very fast through a dense forest without smacking into a tree. Many insects, too, can dart and hover with incredible speed and precision. The goal of the FLA program is to explore non-traditional perception and autonomy methods that would give small UAVs the capacity to perform in a similar way, including an ability to easily navigate tight spaces at high speed and quickly recognize if it had already been in a room before.”

He continued, “if successful, the initial focus is on UAVs, but advances made through the FLA program could potentially be applied to ground, marine and underwater systems, which could be especially useful in GPS-degraded or denied environments.”

Stefanie Tompkins, director of DARPA’s Defence Sciences Office, added:, “Urban and disaster relief operations would be obvious key beneficiaries, but applications for this technology could extend to a wide variety of missions using small and large unmanned systems linked together with manned platforms as a system of systems. By enabling unmanned systems to learn ‘muscle memory’ and perception for basic tasks like avoiding obstacles, it would relieve overload and stress on human operators so they can focus on supervising the systems and executing the larger mission.”

It will only be a question of time as to when this new technology will be initiated. We know that ordinary people are likely to be used as guinea pigs, as we see planes dropping hundreds of even thousands of these bugs across the sky. We need to be careful and keep watching, before they have the opportunity to watch us and take away every ounce of our freedom.

Akashic Times is the UK’s only online, fully independent not-for-profit newspaper that brings you real news from across the globe.

If you want to keep ahead of what is really going on in the world, subscribe to our newspaper via the subscribe button and join our Facebook & Twitter pages. Subscription is completely free ofcourse

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

(Spamcheck Enabled)