It's a gnat! It's a paper plane! It's... MAV!

I spent some time last year looking at the future of biomimicry, and naturally spent much of the project looking at pictures of organically-inspired robots. Tonight Wired News reports that engineers are now working on a new generation of very small robots, capable of either highly targeted operations, or overwhelming enemies through swarm behavior:

Fred Davis, technical director of the Assessment and Demonstrations Division of the Air Force Research Laboratory Munitions Directorate at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, confirmed that the United States has ambitious plans for future micro-munitions, which he says will be pocket-sized with mission-specific payloads.

"You're not going to be knocking down walls," says Davis. "What we're looking at is functional defeat."

This means preventing the target from carrying out its mission, rather than destroying it, Davis says. A truck, for example, can be put out of action by destroying its tires; a MAV can do this by squirting them with few milliliters of a catalytic de-polymerization agent, causing them to disintegrate rapidly....

Israel is developing a robot the size of a hornet to attack terrorists. And although the prototype will not fly for three years, killer Micro Air Vehicles, or MAVs, are much closer than that.

Interestingly, this isn't just theoretical:

British Special Forces already use 6-inch MAV aircraft called WASPs for reconnaissance in Afghanistan. The $3,000 WASP is operated with a Gameboy-style controller and is nearly silent, so it can get very close without being detected. A new development will reportedly see the WASP fitted with a C4 explosive warhead for kamikaze attacks on snipers. One newspaper dubbed it "The Talibanator."

Technorati Tags: biomimicry, military, robotics