[NYTr] Cyborg Moths at anti-war rallies

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Washington Post via San Fran Chronicle - Oct 14, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/10/14/MN83SMCR1.DTL

Dragonfly-like critters at anti-war rallies

Some suspect the strange 'insects' were U.S. spy drones

by Rick Weiss, Washington Post

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an anti-war 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 insect-like drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps
deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.

Others think they are, well, dragonflies - an ancient order of insects
that even biologists concede look about as robotic as a living creature
can look.

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number
of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying.
Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer
chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and
controlling their flight muscles remotely.

The robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or
navigate the crannies of collapsed buildings to find survivors.

The technical challenges of creating robotic insects are daunting, and
most experts doubt that fully working models exist yet.

"If you find something, let me know," said Gary Anderson of the Defense
Department's Rapid Reaction Technology Office.

But the CIA secretly developed a simple dragonfly snooper as long ago as
the 1970s. And given recent advances, even skeptics say there is always
a chance that some agency has quietly managed to make something
operational.

"America can be pretty sneaky," said Tom Ehrhard, a retired Air Force
colonel and expert in unmanned aerial vehicles who is now at the Center
for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonprofit Washington-based
research institute.

Robotic fliers have been used by the military since World War II, but in
the past decade their numbers and level of sophistication have increased
enormously. Defense Department documents describe nearly 100 different
models in use today, some as tiny as birds, and some the size of small
planes.

All told, the nation's fleet of flying robots logged more than 160,000
flight hours last year - a more than fourfold increase since 2003. A
recent report by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College warned
that if traffic rules are not clarified soon, the glut of unmanned
vehicles "could render military airspace chaotic and potentially
dangerous."

But getting from bird size to bug size is not a simple matter of making
everything smaller.

"You can't make a conventional robot of metal and ball bearings and just
shrink the design down," said Ronald Fearing, a roboticist at UC
Berkeley. For one thing, the rules of aerodynamics change at very tiny
scales and require wings that flap in precise ways - a huge engineering
challenge.

Only recently have scientists come to understand how insects fly - a
biomechanical feat that, despite the evidence before scientists' eyes,
was for decades deemed "theoretically impossible." Just last month,
researchers at Cornell University published a physics paper clarifying
how dragonflies adjust the relative motions of their front and rear
wings to save energy while hovering.

That kind of finding is important to roboticists because flapping fliers
tend to be energy hogs, and batteries are heavy.

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.

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.

Only the FBI offered a declarative denial. "We don't have anything like
that," a spokesman said.

The Defense Department is trying, though.

In one approach, researchers funded by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency are inserting computer chips into moth pupae - the
intermediate stage between a caterpillar and a flying adult - and
hatching them into healthy "cyborg moths."

The Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems project aims to
create literal shutterbugs - camera-toting insects whose nerves have
grown into their internal silicon chip so that wranglers can control
their activities. DARPA researchers are also raising cyborg beetles
with power for various instruments to be generated by their muscles.

"You might recall that Gandalf the friendly wizard in the recent classic
'Lord of the Rings' used a moth to call in air support," DARPA program
manager Amit Lal said at a symposium in August. Today, he said, "this
science fiction vision is within the realm of reality."

A DARPA spokeswoman denied a reporter's request to interview Lal or
others on the project.

The cyborg insect project has its share of doubters.

"I'll be seriously dead before that program deploys," said former Vice
Adm. Joe Dyer,once head of the Naval Air Systems Command, now at iRobot
in Burlington, Mass., which makes household and military robots.

By contrast, fully mechanical micro-fliers are advancing quickly.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have made a
"microbat ornithopter" that flies freely and fits in the palm of a
hand. A Vanderbilt University team has made a similar device.

With their sail-like wings, neither of those would be mistaken for
insects. In July, however, a Harvard University team got a truly
fly-like robot airborne, its synthetic wings buzzing at 120 beats per
second.

"It showed that we can manufacture the articulated, high-speed
structures that you need to re-create the complex wing motions that
insects produce," said team leader Robert Wood.

The fly's vanishingly thin materials were machined with lasers, then
folded into three-dimensional form "like a micro-origami," he said.
Alternating electric fields make the wings flap. The whole thing weighs
just 65 milligrams, or a little more than the plastic head of a push
pin.

Still, it can fly only while attached to a threadlike tether that
supplies power, evidence that significant hurdles remain.

In August, at the International Symposium on Flying Insects and Robots,
held in Switzerland, Japanese researchers introduced radio-controlled
fliers with 4-inch wingspans that resemble hawk moths. Those who watch
them fly, its creator wrote in the program, "feel something of 'living
souls.' "

Others, taking a tip from the CIA, are making fliers that run on
chemical fuels instead of batteries. The "entomopter," in early stages
of development at the Georgia Institute of Technology and resembling a
toy plane more than a bug, converts liquid fuel into a hot gas, which
powers four flapping wings and ancillary equipment.

"You can get more energy out of a drop of gasoline than out of a battery
the size of a drop of gasoline," said team leader Robert Michelson.

Even if the technical hurdles are overcome, insect-size fliers will
always be risky investments.

"They can get eaten by a bird, they can get caught in a spider web,"
said Fearing of Berkeley. "No matter how smart you are - you can put a
Pentium in there - if a bird comes at you at 30 mph there's nothing you
can do about it."

Protesters might even nab one with a net - one of many reasons why
Ehrhard, the former Air Force colonel, and other experts said they
doubted that the hovering bugs spotted in Washington were spies.

So what WAS seen by Crane, Alarcon and a handful of others at the march
- and as far back as 2004, during the Republican National Convention in
New York, when one observant but perhaps paranoid peace-march
participant described on the Web "a jet-black dragonfly hovering about
10 feet off the ground, precisely in the middle of 7th avenue ...
watching us"?

They probably saw dragonflies, said Jerry Louton, an entomologist at the
National Museum of Natural History. Washington is home to some large,
spectacularly adorned dragonflies that "can knock your socks off," he
said.

At the same time, he added, some details do not make sense. Three people
at the Washington event independently described a row of spheres, the
size of small berries, attached along the tails of the big dragonflies
- an accoutrement that Louton could not explain. And all reported
seeing at least three maneuvering in unison.

"Dragonflies never fly in a pack," he said.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice said her
group is investigating witness reports and has filed Freedom of
Information Act requests with several federal agencies. If such devices
are being used to spy on political activists, she said, "it would be a
significant violation of people's civil rights."

For many roboticists still struggling to get off the ground, however,
that concern - and their technology's potential role - seems
superfluous.

"I don't want people to get paranoid, but what can I say?" Fearing said.
"Cell-phone cameras are already everywhere. It's not that much
different."