GoKawiilResearchers at Northwestern announced that they may have cracked the drone-invisibility-code. Dubbed the Phantom Twist by its creators, the drone exploits faults in human vision to become nearly invisible to the naked eye. Rotating up to 25 times per second, it achieves the same optical illusion as propellers, spinning so fast that the human eye cannot follow it. Unlike its fanned counterparts, however, the drone lacks stand-still components that root it in your vision. Instead, the drone's propeller and body spin in opposite directions, According to its creators, the Phantom Twist is roughly 10 times less visible than your standard quadcopter and may be the closest we've come to realizing visually invisible aircraft.
Of course, this doesn't mean that the aircraft has achieved full invisibility, instead achieving what the research release calls "a ghostly smudge that seamlessly blends into the background." Perhaps the best way to visualize it is to think of the Predator films, in which a faint outline can be seen. Thankfully, you won't need to coat yourself in mud and go on an Arnold Schwarzenegger-style rampage to find this crafty drone, as the Phantom Twist still has several stealth limitations. For one thing, the UAV makes an audible whirring sound as it spins through the air, tipping any unsuspecting observer off to its movements. Moreover, its engineers admit that its wires and support rods are still somewhat visible, further limiting this model's functional "invisibility."
The UAV was debuted at Sydney, Australia's Robotics: Science and Systems conference, where its designers delivered a talk titled Computational Design of a Low-Visibility UAV Using Human-Aligned Perceptual Metric. Interested readers can dive deeper into the team's feat of engineering through the paper that accompanied the talk on the conference's website. The project, partly funded by the National Science Foundation, was conducted by members of Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering's Center for Robotics and Biosystems.