Watch This AI-Designed Spinning Drone Turn Invisible In Flight
Made from the stuff of blurry UFO sightings, engineers at Northwestern University have unveiled a drone that nearly vanishes in mid-air and not by using advanced camouflage or light-bending materials, but simply by spinning too fast for the eye to track.
Presented at the Robotics: Science and Systems 2026 conference in Sydney, Australia, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), called the Phantom Twist, exploits the motion blur phenomenon. While a regular quadcopter keeps its main body stationarywhile spinning separate blades, the Phantom Twist consists of just one motor and one propeller. The propeller spins rapidly in one direction while the entire body of the drone rotates in the opposite direction. Revolving up to 25 times per second, the drone effectively tricks human eyes, which process visual information in a way similar to a camera's exposure time. Instead of seeing a flying object, observers see a ghostly, semi-transparent smudge that blends...
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