Here’s the company’s website which has movies of the prototype in action.
Can a surveillance drone be made virtually invisible? VeraTech, based in Minnesota, US, thinks so. And patent applications filed by the company explain how.
“Persistence of vision” turns the fast-moving rotors of any helicopter into a near-transparent blur, while the slow-moving body looks solid. Inventor Michael Dammar has come up with a way of making the whole body of an aircraft spin as it flies, turning it into a single blur in the sky. This would not evade radar but should help the aircraft avoid visual identification.
The so-called Phantom Sentinel aircraft is Y-shaped, consisting of a single long wing attached to two short aerodynamic extensions which each end in a propeller. And the weight is carefully balanced so that the centre of mass is positioned between the two extensions. When the motors are running, the solid part of the aircraft spins around this centre of mass, and the longer wing generates lift. The whole thing moves so fast that persistence of vision turns it into a single blur.
Making the plane sky blue, or largely transparent, should help conceal it further, Dammar claims. He adds that a camera can be placed near the centre of mass and used to build a panoramic picture of the ground below, after software processing.
My first thought for this device is that it could be used by insurgencies to bring down low flying helecopters.
Just add a little explosive payload and the pilot wouldn’t see it coming.
Yikes.
I can see how this would work for intel missions. The camera would be spinning like mad and wouldn’t be able to take any images. Though I could see it being used to transport small objects in the battle field.
But it looks like a remote controlled boomerang.
but I could see it as well as a similar sized model airplane on the video. More BS from the defense establishment.
The stuff our Gov. already has avalible is scarey.Flying M-16s,drones the size of large insects that both listen and look.Dean Ing’s fiction has it right.BTW if Bush’s new law passes I could count on a vist from the FBI for writing this!
With its ever-moving and spinning surfaces, wouldn’t this thing be more visible to radar than a relatively static object?
i want one!
i could see it invisible my ass if i saw a giant flying boomerang like that i would shoot it