Forget the roachbots and the swarm of MIT humanoid robots dancing in sync, as well as “disposable” quarter-sized kilobots which are “cheap enough to swarm in the thousands,” and think instead of DARPA-like tiny insect cyborg drones that are “designed to go places that soldiers cannot” to work as spies or as swarm weapons. Is this a mosquito micro air vehicle (MAV)?
Alan Lovejoy wrote, “Such a device could be controlled from a great distance and is equipped with a camera, microphone. It could land on you and then use its needle to take a DNA sample with the pain of a mosquito bite. Or it could inject a micro RFID tracking device under your skin.” While DNA-sucking, RFID-chip-injecting mosquito drones are currently a bunch of bunk, a Bing image search shows a multitude of MAVs that aren’t simply CGI mockups.
This little MAV had a 3 centimeter wingspan and that was back in 2007. When the U.S. government was accused of making insect spy drones in 2007, Tom Ehrhard, a retired Air Force colonel and expert on unmanned aerial craft, told the Telegraph, “America can be pretty sneaky.” The article also mentioned a dragonfly drone the CIA had developed in the 1970s.
