Northwestern University in the US has developed a low-visibility drone called the “Phantom Twist.” It achieves low visibility by spinning itself into visual oblivion and rotating up to 25 times per second. That is far too fast for the human eye to process.
Interestingly, this motion blur transforms the drone into a faint, semi-transparent smudge that blends into its surroundings rather than achieving total invisibility.
“Most efforts to hide drones focus on making them look like their surroundings,” said Michael Rubenstein, who led the work. “Instead, we asked whether we could design the drone itself around the way humans perceive motion. This idea of low visibility through persistent motion is something few people have explored.”
Conventional drones often disrupt wildlife and human behavior simply by being noticed.
Scientists have tried everything from high-tech light-bending optics to transparent plastics and hyper-realistic camouflage. But a team of roboticists at Northwestern University decided to stop trying to hide the drone.
The idea was to focus on altering a drone‘s physical appearance to change how it is perceived. In this development, the standard stationary-body quadcopter design was replaced with a single-motor system where the propeller and the entire drone body spin in opposite directions to minimize visibility.
Quadcopters remain highly visible because their bulky central bodies stay completely stationary while only rotors spin, but the Phantom Twist mimics a fast-spinning ceiling fan. Rotating its entire structure allows the drone to blur its body into a semi-transparent disc, Interesting Engineering reported.