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It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's A Drone!!

Posted by Dean Lamborn on February 17, 2011 at 7:00am

It's a Nano Hummingbird!

Aerovironment has been working on this since 2006. Under a $4 million contract from Darpa they have a hummingbird drone that weighs 19 grams, flies 11 mph, can hover, fly forwards, backwards or sideways, turn clockwise and counterclockwise and flight time is 8 minutes.

19 grams! Battery, motors, communications, video camera, and hummingbird paint scheme. That's less than 4 nickels in weight.

The pentagon mileposts for this project include hovering in a 5 mph wind, fly indoors and back out through a normal size doorway.

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Comments

hamish February 21, 2011 at 5:10pm

Quite alot of funding for a robot with 0 guns!
Andrew Van Der Plaats February 21, 2011 at 3:07pm

Saw this report on this project here as well today -

U.S. military’s newest urban spy
Rich Weaver February 19, 2011 at 10:21am

Quoting my source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_air_battery

The theoretical specific energy (of a LiO2 battery) excluding oxygen is 11140 Wh/kg, or 40.1 megajoules per kilogram. Compare this to the figure of 44 megajoules per kilogram for gasoline (see petrol energy content)

And paraphrasing from Hollywood we may not need no stinking engines
Bryan Steelmon February 18, 2011 at 10:02am

why no solar panels?.... they could esialy increase the flight time....... or dosent that goverment grade stuff just come in a black box........lol.... maybe you could get ahold of those printable solar cells......
Dean Lamborn February 18, 2011 at 8:48am

Hmm . . . The micro turbine in a hummingbird. Don't ya think the sound might give it away? :)
Paul Marsh February 18, 2011 at 6:04am

@Jared S -- Here is "bird"...
Paul Marsh February 18, 2011 at 4:49am

@Justin -- "Hopefully something like micro turbines will come along shortly."

Since you mentioned it, you might already be aware of this, but MIT was looking at micro-turbines some time ago. I think the project has been all but abandoned, but that doesn't mean it might not come up again. One of the initial goals was power generation, i.e. turbine powered batteries. But their use was proposed for micro air vehicles (MAVs). Here's an old article on the subject: "Turbines on a Dime."
tazdevil February 18, 2011 at 2:00am

what is the next step, big brother is watching you ...

Aerovironment is always a source of inspiration...
Ørjan Kvalheim Lønningen February 17, 2011 at 1:49pm

cool, but it's way bigger than a Hummingbird
little flight time (maybe much compared to size but still not long)
Brad Smith February 17, 2011 at 12:30pm

my cables weight more than that,,,