New Spinning Drone Hides In Plain Sight (northwestern.edu)
- Reference: 0184821902
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/08/02/220231/new-spinning-drone-hides-in-plain-sight
- Source link: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2026/07/new-spinning-drone-hides-in-plain-sight
"The drone spins up to 25 times per second, which is too fast for the human eye to see clearly. While it isn't completely invisible, it morphs into a ghostly smudge that seamlessly blends into the background... "
> To design the drone, the Northwestern team first used a computational model to generate roughly 20,000 drone configurations capable of stable flight. Then, they used artificial intelligence (AI) and optimization algorithms to repeatedly rearrange the drones' major components, including a motor, propeller, circuit board, counterweight and batteries. After sifting through many different configurations, the algorithms determined the ideal placement of the drone's components to minimize its visibility from virtually every viewing angle while allowing for stable flight.
>
> After selecting promising candidates, the engineers simulated each drone spinning in flight and overlaid those images a hundred real-world backgrounds. Then, they used a perception model that approximates human vision to determine how noticeable each design appeared. Designs that blended into their surroundings received lower visibility scores. The team selected the 500 lowest-scoring designs and applied the optimization algorithm, which repeatedly adjusted the positions of components to further minimize those scores. "The design process was fully automated," [said Northwestern's associate CS professor Michael Rubenstein, who led the work]. "Then, when we were confident that a drone met all our criteria, we built it."
They've named the drone "Phantom Twist"," and plan to design future iterations with more transparent materials or quieter propulsion to make it even less noticeable.
The Northwestern team [2]presented the work on July 16 at [3]Robotics: Science and Systems 2026 in Sydney, Australia...
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader [4]fahrbot-bot for sharing the news.
[1] https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2026/07/new-spinning-drone-hides-in-plain-sight
[2] https://roboticsconference.org/program/papers/196/
[3] https://roboticsconference.org/
[4] https://www.slashdot.org/~fahrbot-bot
And the world keeps getting scarier (Score:4, Insightful)
n/a
Cool (Score:2)
I reckon we may notice if it's nearby even without seeing it.
Vaguely less visible man! (Score:3)
"It is I, vaguely less visible than you'd otherwise suspect man! I shall sneak by their cameras while hoping they aren't paying attention that much. For if they do glance at the cameras they'll have to be paying more attention than usual to see me, haha!"
Make a silent drone I'll be more impressed (Score:3)
Those things are loud.
Not too worryng (Score:2)
The range and payload penalties will be enormous.
If only we couldn't hear. (Score:2)
I mean on the camera they used, yeah it is harder to instantly see. But that only really helps if you're not looking for it, or it goes by pretty quickly.
Or if it had VERY good sensors that could work from a long distance... I guess that might offer something.
I mean unique solution to the problem, sure.
Now try this (Score:2)
So what happens when you paint it with [1]Vantablack [wikipedia.org]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack
Re: Now try this (Score:2)
I'd bet it becomes even less visible. I find black mosquitoes almost impossible to see without a contrasting background. I can't imagine how you'd see them if they were moving in a circular motion at 25 rpm. Humans are remarkably bad at telling if something is 50 or even 75% dimmer. If this were spinning at 25 rpm you'd be dealing with something 4% dimmer if it was non-emissive. Whereas if it's white you see an actual change in color, which humans are really good at.
Flying Saucers (Score:2)
People keep saying it's hard to get a non-blurry picture of them.
Some have suspected somebody has gravity bubble tech which would bend the light.
This thing just spins but isn't itself a disc, though on average it's s disc while in motion.
Post WWII-Germany/Paperclip there were more visible saucers seen over Washington and such but the Germans were developing solid discs. The blurry ones are more over the past few decades as drone tech has become common.
Curious.
Ukraine (Score:2)
Send the plans to Ukraine. They're good at this stuff, they'll figure out how to make it bigger.
25 x per sec (Score:4, Interesting)
how does it see out?
Re: (Score:2)
Designing a drone using this technique that could do anything useful would appear to be a considerable challenge. You would have to add the equipment to do whatever you wanted without unbalancing the drone and also make it work despite the spin. Probably not impossible, but would it be worth the effort?
Re: (Score:2)
Given the limitless military budgets to spend on spying yeah I'm sure it would be.
As always we can't give food to people who are hungry but when it comes to coming up with ever increasingly intricate ways to hurt them we've always got the money for that...
Oh and I'm sure companies like Planitir are interested in this technology. Dystopian bullshit like this is a side effect of giving too much money to a handful of psychopaths. Outside of the occasional mega celebrity it's basically impossible to hav
Re: (Score:2)
O you again.
He's just not into you.
Let it go, Let it go...
Re: (Score:2)
I imagine it could see 360 if equipped with cameras. I don't even think it would be a super hard problem to solve.
Re: (Score:2)
Make sure your camera is capable of 25 frames per second, and look at every 25th frame. Pretty trivial, actually, and with a large memory card, you have 360 video as good as most movies.
Re: 25 x per sec (Score:2)
Just use a 1D camera and get a panoramic image. A 1D camera would be capable of extremely high frames per second with inexpensive hardware.
Re: (Score:1)
> Designing a drone using this technique that could do anything useful would appear to be a considerable challenge. You would have to add the equipment to do whatever you wanted without unbalancing the drone and also make it work despite the spin. Probably not impossible, but would it be worth the effort?
If it can be made large enough to carry explosive charges it would be useful on the battlefield. You might hear it but have a hard time spottig it until it goes boom.
Re: (Score:3)
The challenge is that it's small and wirey. It's that by design because going larger would make it easily visible.
Besides, regular drones are hard enough to see, and even harder to hit, at the speeds they travel with explosives.
Re: (Score:2)
the prototype seems balanced with a simple makeshift ballast [1]https://news.northwestern.edu/... [northwestern.edu] i guess to distribute the mass in a way to preserve the visual effect of spin. clever! i guess suspending a static part from a gyro in the center of spin shouldn't be too difficult ... e.g. a ccd sensor could be very small, still hard to detect. the thing is quite noisy, though ...
[1] https://news.northwestern.edu/assets/Slides/drone1540__ScaleMaxWidthWzc3MF0.jpg
Re: (Score:2)
> how does it see out?
Perhaps it's a bit like the Star Trek cloaking device (which while in use prevents the use of shields or weapons). If the drone wants to see, it needs to drop its cloaking device.
Re: 25 x per sec (Score:4, Insightful)
Silly idea but if it's rotating at that speed the wouldn't it be possible to capture images at 25fps? I assume the rotation would be fairly consistent so timing the image capture should be possible.
Re: (Score:3)
> how does it see out?
At that frequency? Like a bat.
Now I wonder about harmonic dampening. Not sure it's really all that "invisible" if it sounds like a billion-strong army of mosquitos on meth at 200 yards and causes frogs to randomly explode..
Re: (Score:3)
If it's spinning at that rate couldn't you have the camera synchronized to the spins so it's capturing a frame when it's turned to the same position? Kinda like the mechanism that allowed fighter planes to have machine guns mounted in front of the pilot and shooting between the propeller blades. Motion picture cameras are 24 fps.
Re: (Score:2)
> If it's spinning at that rate couldn't you have the camera synchronized to the spins so it's capturing a frame when it's turned to the same position? Kinda like the mechanism that allowed fighter planes to have machine guns mounted in front of the pilot and shooting between the propeller blades. Motion picture cameras are 24 fps.
An axially mounted camera would not ned to spin. Not invisible, but a much smaller thing to spot.
Re: (Score:2)
You put cameras on every surface. You end up with a spinning 360 degree view that you can unspin programmatically.
I'm not really seeing an issue TBH especially with how small and thin cameras are these days and, indeed, that moving them continually combining them with other views from cameras in the same sphere means you can almost certainly build up a higher quality image than you would with a single camera.