The smallest self-powered, controllable drone has just been unveiled. Named Piccolissimo—after the Italian word for pocket-sized or tiniest—the drone comes in two sizes. The first one is the size of a quarter, weighing less than 2.5 grams while the second one is a bit larger and heavier, by two grams, and wider by a centimeter.
Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science have built the self-powered and controllable flying robot using a 3D-printed frame, a lithium polymer battery, a motor, and a simple control mechanism.
The drone can reportedly fly and steer because both, the body and the propeller work together. A tiny motor spins the body while the propeller spins the opposite direction. The propeller is mounted off-center, which is how the drone steers. By precisely changing the speed of the propeller at different points during the rotation of the body, the drone can control the direction of its movement respectively.
The drone is also said to work by spinning their bodies 40 times per second, while the single propeller spins at 800 times during that same period.
Creator Matthew Piccoli, a Ph.D. student with the Modular Robotics Laboratory says, "Spinning vehicles are pretty terrible for carrying people, but pretty fantastic for carrying sensors. It's a common practice to make a simple sensor, and then spin it around, like radar dishes at airports. We get this feature for free, so we could take a line-scan camera, like in a barcode reader, put it on the vehicle body, and get a 360-degree panorama. These cameras are simpler and smaller than a normal 2D camera, and yet we'd get a better field of view."
Researchers believe that 100 or 1,000 small controllable flyers like the Piccolissimo, could cover more of a disaster site than a single large drone and could be cheaper too.
About the Piccolissimo
The Piccolissimo can carry about one gram worth of equipment aid which is said to be more than enough to carry a camera or other atmospherics sensors that can be used to create a 360 degree panorama, as the drone spins. This drone could be used in search and rescue operations where hundreds of tiny drones or more cover an area looking for survivours too
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