Fly-on-the-Wall Spy Drone

That buzzing may not be a fly at all. It may be the most advanced tool being used to observe and report on activity.

http://www.aolnews.com/2010/04/29/stanford-researchers-unveil-fly-on-the-wall-spy-drone/19459430/

(April 29) -- Imagine a tiny drone that can quietly fly up to a building, land on the wall and then stay put for days, feeding video or audio back to its operators. A recently released video of just such a perching drone demonstrates that this futuristic surveillance scenario may not be that far away.The micro unmanned aerial vehicle, created by engineers from Stanford's biomimetics lab, works by using "feet" equipped with tiny spines that can grab onto rough surfaces, such as brick or concrete. In fact, a perching spy drone is exactly what the Stanford engineers had in mind when they first envisioned this concept.

In a white paper describing the drone, Stanford professor Mark R. Cutkosky and graduate student Alexis Lussier Desbiens wrote that this work could lead to "a flock of small, unmanned air vehicles [that] flies quietly into a city, maneuvering among the buildings." The tiny drones would seek out "places to land, not on streets or rooftops but on the sides of buildings and under the eaves, where they can cling, bat- or insect-like, in relative safety and obscurity."

Long-endurance miniature drones would certainly be an attractive technology for the military or intelligence community. A recent article in The Washington Post says the CIA was operating a pizza-platter-sized surveillance drone in Pakistan that could stay aloft for more than a day -- a claim that, if true, greatly exceeds the endurance of known fielded micro UAVs, which typically fly for less than an hour.