Here Comes The Drones (The Minituarized Versions That Is)

U.S. Air Force Developing Terrifying Swarms Of Tiny Unmanned Drones That can Hover, Crawl And Even Kill Targets -- Daily Mail

* Air Vehicles Directorate at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, is already developing prototypes of tiny drones that can hover
* The Micro Air Vehicles will work in swarms to provide complex surveillance of a battlefield
* They can also be armed with incapacitating chemicals, combustible payloads or even explosives 'for precision targeting capability'

The U.S. Air Force is developing tiny unmanned drones that will fly in swarms, hover like bees, crawl like spiders and even sneak up on unsuspecting targets and execute them with lethal precision.

The Air Vehicles Directorate, a research arm of the Air Force, has released a computer-animated video outlining the the future capabilities of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). The project promises to revolutionize war by down-sizing the combatants.

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My Comment: The possibilities are endless .... but I can easily see the day when miniaturized drones will do the scouting, locating the enemy, and exercising lethal force for the soldiers who are on patrol, at their FOBs, or waiting for the enemy to show up.

The Evolution Of Micro-Air-Vehicles (MAV)

Cyborg Beetle Aktakka, et al. via PhysOrg

Scientists Fit Cyborg Beetles With Generators That Turn Their Own Wings Into Power Plants -- Popular Science

No more battery-driven bugs for DARPA.

For years now, DARPA and other free-thinking research institutions have been developing micro-air-vehicles (MAV), usually modeled after insects. But building a tiny, lightweight flying robot is tough when you need a power supply--like an onboard battery--to keep the MAV flying. Then researchers turned to insect mind control--implanting live insects with machinery that lets humans manipulate their movements--but the problem remained: neural control hardware requires a battery to run.

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My Comment: The tools for surveillance are getting smaller and smaller.

Air Force Bugbots

Hat Tip: Theo Spark

Video: Air Force's Killer Bugbots Attack

From The Danger Room:

The U.S. military has been working for a while on tiny, buglike drones — to serve as miniature flying spies, Defense Department robot-makers say. But this video, from the Air Force Research Laboratory, shows that the military is also interested in turning these "Micro Air Vehicles," or MAVs, into biomorphic weapons that can lie in secret for weeks at a time — and then strike an adversary with lethal accuracy.

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My Comment: This is impressive. It's evasive approach towards a target is the bets part of this technology. You can send it anywhere, and it will scan the region for possible targets.

If I had a number of these MAVs available, I will be flooding the Tribal regions of Pakistan in the search for Bin Laden.