Now You See It, Now You Don’t: This New Drone Spins Itself Invisible
People are finding uses for drones in applications ranging from monitoring wildlife to inspecting bridges and other infrastructure, but there is one problem that is difficult to avoid: they are pretty hard to ignore. Seeing a drone hovering nearby can cause animals to scatter or people to change their behavior. But now, researchers at Northwestern University have developed an unusual drone that tackles this problem by exploiting a quirk of human vision to nearly disappear in midair.
Called Phantom Twist, the experimental drone does not rely on camouflage or complicated optical systems to hide itself. Instead, nearly the entire aircraft spins at up to 25 rotations per second. That is fast enough to produce a motion blur effect that makes its individual components difficult for the human eye to distinguish, causing the drone to appear more like a faint, semi-transparent haze than a clearly defined flying machine.
The drone...
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