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Science and technology The Economist December 16th 2017 71

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72 Predicting sinkholes
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74 How fish sustain forests
74 Speeding the departure of airliners

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Miniature robotics Existing small drones are usually poly-
Bot flies copters—helicopters that have a set of ro-
tors (generally four or six) arranged at the
vertices of a regular polygon, rather than a
single one above their centre of gravity.
Some MAST researchers, however, think
they have alighted on somethingbetter.
Their proposed replacement is the
cyclocopter. This resembles an airborne
Militaryrobots are getting smallerand more capable
paddle steamer. Though the idea of cyclo-
N NOVEMBER 12th a video called sity of Maryland, Texas A&M University copters has been around for a while, the
O“Slaughterbots” was uploaded to and Berkeley (the workat Berkeley is unre- strong, lightweight materials needed to
YouTube. It is the brainchild of Stuart Rus- lated to Dr Russell’s). Its successor, the Dis- make them have hitherto been unavail-
sell, a professor of artificial intelligence at tributed and Collaborative Intelligent Sys- able and the computing tools needed to
the University of California, Berkeley, and tems and Technology (DCIST) programme, design them have only recently been
was paid for by the Future of Life Institute which began earlier this year, is now get- created. Now that those materials and
(FLI), a group of concerned scientists and tinginto its stride. tools do exist, things are advancingrapidly.
technologists that includes Elon Musk, Ste- In 2008, when MAST began, a spy Overthe course ofthe MAST project the re-
phen Hawking and Martin Rees, Britain’s drone that you could hold in the palm of searchers have shrunk cyclocopters from
Astronomer Royal. It is set in a near-future your hand was an idea from science fic- being behemoths weighing half a kilo-
in which small drones fitted with face-rec- tion. Such drones are now commonplace. gram to svelte devices that tip the scales at
ognition systems and shaped explosive Alongwith flyingdrones, MAST’sresearch- lessthan 30 grams. Such machinescan out-
charges can be programmed to seek out ers have been developingpocket-sized bat- perform polycopters.
and kill known individualsorclasses ofin- tlefield scouts that can hop or crawl ahead Cyclocopter aerodynamics is more like
dividuals (those wearing a particular uni- ofsoldiers. DCIST’spurpose isto take these that of insects than of conventional air-
form, for example). In one scene, the autonomousrobotsand make them co-op- craft, in that lift is generated by stirring the
drones are shown collaborating with each erate. The result, if the project succeeds, air into vortices rather than relying on its
other to gain entrance to a building. One will be swarms ofdevices that can take co- flow over aerofoils. For small cyclocopters
acts as a petard, blasting through a wall to ordinated action to achieve a joint goal. this helps. Vortex effects become propor-
grant access to the others. tionately more powerful as an aircraft
“Slaughterbots” is fiction. The question Ahop, skip and jump away shrinks, but, in the case of conventional
Dr Russell poses is, “how long will it re- At the moment, America’s defence depart- craft, including polycopters, that makes
main so?” Formilitary laboratories around ment is committed to keeping such things worse, by decreasing stability. Cy-
the planet are busy developing small, au- swarms under human control, so that the clocopters get betteras they get smaller.
tonomous robots for use in warfare, both decision to pull a triggerwill always be tak- They are also quieter. As Moble Bene-
conventional and unconventional. In en by a person rather than a machine. The dictofTexasA&M, one ofthe leadersof the
America, in particular, a programme called Pentagon is as alarmed by the prospect of cyclocopter project, observes, “aerody-
MAST (Micro Autonomous Systems and freebooting killer robots as the FLI is. But, namic noise is a strong function of the
Technology), which has been run by the as someone said of nuclear weapons after blade-tip speed”—hence the whup-whup-
US Army Research Laboratory in Mary- the first one was detonated, the only secret whup of helicopters. The blade-tip speeds
land, is wrapping up this month after ten worth keepingisnowout: the damn things of cyclocopters are much lower. That
successful years. MAST co-ordinated and work. If swarms of small robots can be makes them ideal for spying. They also
paid for research by a consortium ofestab- made to collaborate autonomously, some- have better manoeuvrability, and are less
lished laboratories, notably at the Univer- one, somewhere will do it. disturbed by gusts ofwind. 1