Posted by ketyung
on Sep/23/2008
at 8:28 am
Spy planes should come in the shape of a “bird” for better camouflage. Univerisity of Michigan has been awarded a 5-year grant of $10 millions for the development of some bat-like robotic spy planes.
The bat-like spy plane has been given a acronym called COM-BAT which stands for U-M Center for Objective Microelectronics and Biomimetic Advanced Technology, which aims to re-establish the U.S Army as a world leader.
The kind of bat-like spy planes are designed to provide short-term but real-time surveillance and feedback to the soldiers in the urban combat zones by using a collection of senses including sight, sound and smell. The main problem faced by the development of the COM-BAT is finding it a super lasting battery that allows it to fly long enough in the sky to collect all the necessary information for the soldiers before it drops to the ground.
The development team is looking into possibility of get its power to be generated by vibrations, wind and also the sun, which the University of Michigan has some achievement in the past. Besides, the COM-BAT project is also to help existing technologies to look into improvements such as for much smaller size of solar cells and much more effective navigation and communication systems.
University of Michigan is only one of the four centers chosen for the development of COM-BAT. Other universities in the list are University of California at Berkeley and the University of New Mexico. Each school is responsible on a different system or module development on the spy plane.
via [ohgizmo]
spy plane,bat-like spy plane
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