World's Smallest Camera Plane Shows Off in Public

It has a 4-inch wingspan and weighs just over 3 grams. It looks like a dragonfly, and its flapping wings make it fly just like one. But it's a man-made aircraft which carries a tiny camera that transmits live video of what it sees — and it is intended to be merely the forerunner of much smaller aerial drones to come.

The DelFly Micro, which its developers say is the world's smallest camera-equipped aircraft, made its public debut today in a sports center at Delft in the Netherlands. The four-man research team from the Delft University of Technology that built the DelfFly Micro presented it to a media audience, conducting the first public demonstration flight of the tiny vehicle.

Team member Bart Remes said he and his colleagues Christophe De Wagter, Guido de Croon and Rick Ruijsink first flew the DelFly Micro on May 5. It represents the third generation of DelFly micro air vehicles (MAVs) developed by the team, coming after the much larger DelFly I that first flew in 2005 and the second-generation DelFly II that flew for the first time in 2006.

The team's primary goal in developing the DelFly family of MAVs has been to investigate the aerodynamics of ornithopters — aircraft that fly by flapping their wings like a bird or insect. The airflows round the thin PET films that make up the MAVs' wings "are so difficult (to model), no computer can simulate them," said Remes. "We can’t do it with calculations, so we can only do measurements."

In the course of its research the team measured the movements of smoke particles over the wings of the 11-inch-span, 16-gram DelFly II, and incorporated force sensors into its wings to determine how much lift the wings generated at different flapping frequencies.

Miniaturization and autonomous flight

The researchers found the ideal wing-flapping frequency for the DelFly II was 14 beats per second, said Remes. The wings of the DelFly Micro, which has a much greater ratio of weight to wing area, need to flap 30 times a second for optimally efficient flight.

In addition to helping the team carry out its research into the aerodynamics of ornithopters, each new DelFly generation has helped achieve other goals of the program. One important goal is to achieve a greater degree of miniaturization with each succeeding generation, and a second is to achieve autonomous flight, said Remes.

So far the DelFly Micro hasn’t flown autonomously: It still has to be flown remotely by a pilot, who juggles the joysticks on a wireless remote-control unit to control the vehicle's flight in response to what he sees on the video feed from the MAV's tiny camera. However, the Micro's predecessor the DelFly II has achieved autonomous flight, said Remes.