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We can think of no possible way that a newly invented invisible drone can be used nefariously.
Rather than relying on camouflage, the flying gizmo created by researchers at Northwestern University exploits the motion blur effect in our fallible human vision to almost disappear by spinning at an absurd 25 times per second.
This is too quick for us and many animals to see clearly, becoming a gossamer smear that blends into the background, like the way the blades of a helicopter do, only more extreme.
One day, this type of design could be used for completely peaceful pursuits, the researchers say — like observing wildlife, of course.
“Most efforts to hide drones focus on making them look like their surroundings,” Michael Rubenstein, an associate professor of computer science and mechanical engineering at Northwestern who led the research, said in a statement about the work.
“Instead, we asked whether we could design the drone itself around the way humans perceive motion,” he added. “This idea of low visibility through persistent motion is something few people have explored.”
New drone nearly disappears in flight
To create the drone, dubbed “Phantom Twist,” the team used a computational model to churn out around 20,000 different drone designs, then used AI and optimization algorithms to repeatedly rearrange how its major parts, like their motor and propeller, were configured.
Then they took the best configurations and used a model that simulates human perception to quantify how visible each design appeared. The least visible designs were chosen to be further rearranged with the optimization algorithm, until landing on the blurriest candidate of them all.
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