Swarms of "Nano Air" Drones in your Not Distant Future

Via TPM:

Lockheed Martin began work on the Samarai in 2007 under a Defense Department program called "nano air," designed to produce "an extremely small, ultra lightweight air vehicle system."

Imagine a cheap, tiny, hovering aerial drone capable of being launched with the flick of a person’s wrist and able to provide manipulable 360-degree surveillance views.

It’s real, it’s inspired by maple seeds, and the company behind it, Lockheed Martin, envisions a future in which swarms of the new drones can be deployed at a fraction of the cost and with greater capabilities than drones being used today by the military and other agencies.

"Think about dropping a thousand of these out of an aircraft," said Bill Borgia, head of Lockheed Martin’s Intelligent Robotics Lab... "Think about the wide area over which one collect imagery. Instead of sending one or two expensive, highly valuable aircraft like we do today, you could send thousands of these inexpensive aircraft, and they are almost expendable."

If this embedded video does not load, go here.

Borgia said that the drone, or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), was designed to be deployed in confined settings, such as urban environments or even inside buildings, where it could be piloted into different rooms and hover outside of windows, collecting surveillance footage with ease.

Then there’s the Samarai’s realtime video feed, which an operator can pan and tilt in a full 360 degrees, a capability not found on any other drone of its class, this despite the fact that the drone only contains one camera which is constantly being whipped around by the rotating motion of the aircraft itself.

In order to obtain a steady video feed with the ability to virtually pan and tilt, Lockheed relies on a series of image processing algorithms, [that] "sort of de-rotate the video and turn it back into a frame-by-frame view, similar to what you would see on any basic TV,” Borgia said. “All of the image processing is done onboard."

Borgia declined to specify the drone’s range or endurance, that is, the time it’s able to stay aloft in the air.

Besides the 30-cm version shown in the June demo video, Lockheed also has field-tested a 17-cm version and is working now to scale down the Samarai even further, to the size of an actual maple seed. [emphasis mine]