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Agencies Trying To Craft Insect-Size Spy Drones

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By RICK WEISS, The Washington Post

Published: October 12, 2007

WASHINGTON - Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

'I heard someone say, 'Oh my God, look at those,'' the college senior from New York recalled. 'I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are NOT insects.'

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

'I'd never seen anything like it in my life,' the Washington lawyer said. 'They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?''

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.

Others think they are, well, dragonflies - an ancient order of insects that even biologists concede look about as robotic as a living creature can look.

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.

Robotic fliers have been used by the military since World War II, but in the past decade their numbers and level of sophistication have increased enormously. Defense Department documents describe nearly 100 different models in use today, some as tiny as birds, and some the size of small planes.

Getting from bird size to bug size, however, is not a simple matter of making everything smaller.

'You can't make a conventional robot of metal and ball bearings and just shrink the design down,' said Ronald Fearing, a roboticist at the University of California at Berkeley. For one thing, the rules of aerodynamics change at very tiny scales and require wings that flap in precise ways - a huge engineering challenge.

Only recently have scientists come to understand how insects fly - a biomechanical feat that, despite the evidence before scientists' eyes, was for decades deemed 'theoretically impossible.'

The CIA was among the earliest to tackle the problem. The 'insectothopter,' developed 30 years ago, looked just like a dragonfly and contained a tiny gasoline engine to make the four wings flap. It flew but was ultimately declared a failure because it could not handle crosswinds.

Agency spokesman George Little said he could not talk about what the CIA may have done since then. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service also declined to discuss the topic.

Only the FBI offered a declarative denial.

The Defense Department is trying, though.

Even if the technical hurdles are overcome, insect-size fliers will always be risky investments.

'They can get eaten by a bird, they can get caught in a spider web,' said Fearing of Berkeley. 'No matter how smart you are - you can put a Pentium in there - if a bird comes at you at 30 miles per hour there's nothing you can do about it.'

Protesters might even nab one with a net - one of many reasons why Ehrhard, the former Air Force colonel, and other experts said they doubted that the hovering bugs spotted in Washington were spies.

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