Flapping wings might be better than rotors for a small surveillance UAV, engineers with the French aerospace research agency ONERA said June 18 at the 47th Paris Air Show.ONERA’s simulation studies on a third-generation micro air vehicle dubbed
Remanta show that such wings used less energy than a mini-helicopter design while delivering speedy flight, hover, endurance and agility, engineers Agnès Luc Boulah and Bruiec Danet said.
The Remanta is a partial demonstrator with a 15-centimeter wing and endurance of around 10 minutes. The micro-drone would fly on a programmed route into confined spaces, perform urban reconnaissance and send imagery for target acquisition and designation. The range would be a few hundred meters and include day/night capability.
Actuators would drive the flapping carbon-fiber wings. The major challenge is finding the power source, which must be compact and deliver 10 to 20 watts. Advances in power cells for mobile phones show promise.
A working demonstrator could be fielded in 10 years, the engineers said.
Labs in Cranfield and Shrivenham in Britain, German researchers and DARPA are also working on flapping wings for micro aerial vehicles.
Got a destination too dirty or dangerous for a person to want to go there? The day could soon come when a robot vehicle takes humans' place as a matter of course.
The Soldiers slip around the edge of the wall, stacking up against a rusty metal door blocking access to the compound. With a heavy punch of a boot, the entry is ripped from its hinges and the Soldiers pour into the hard-packed dirt yard in a flow of lethal green.
The Defense Department's plans to study implanting microchips in soldiers is already sparking concerns about privacy issues (and is likely to send the stock price of tinfoil to new highs).
When there’s no safe escape, call in the Mules: These unmanned aerial vehicles could save lives on the battlefield—and off.
DARPA is now accepting applications for a new "smart tape" sensor patch to monitor the health of soldiers on and off of the battlefield.
Tiny array placed in auditory nerve may one day offer superior alternative to cochlear implants, U-M animal study suggests.
The likes of Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, and Diego Maradona, besides their athletic ability, have an incredible sense of the players around them, which allowed them to display incredible plays in their respective sports.
The head of U.S. Air Force intelligence and surveillance on Thursday said data available commercially through online mapping software such as Google Earth posed a danger to security but could not be rolled back.
University of Florida researchers used gene therapy to restore sight in mice with a form of hereditary blindness, a finding that has bearing on many of the most common blinding diseases.
Seapower is the official magazine of the Navy League but under the direction of Richard Barnard, Peter Atkinson, and Rick Burgess in recent years it has also emerged as a great source of future tech news and information.
The U.S. military, in its search for the next surveillance system, bioterror vaccine or robot warrior, has decided to take a peek into the garage. 
By ZACHARY M. PETERSON
