Dutch researchers create miniature flying ‘dragonfly’

My colleague Katharine Sanderson recently wrote about how poor regulation was hindering scientists’ use of unmanned aerial vehicles. Now Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has a nice example of the sort of toys scientists may miss out on if legislation doesn’t get sorted out.

Dragonfly mimic DelFly Micro weighs just 3 grams and measures just 10 cm across but still manages to carry a camera. According to the university it can fly for three minutes at up to 5 metres a second.

“In a few years time, the new objective of the project, the DelFly NaNo (5 cm, 1 gram) will have been developed,” says the press release. “The Micro is an important intermediate step in this development process. A second objective for the future is for the DelFly to be able to fly entirely independently thanks to image recognition software.”

Maybe in a few years time those legislative problems will have been sorted out as well and we can start doing some science with these things.

Videos of the various DelFly types below the fold.