The military is working on a version that’s three times smaller. On Dec. 16, the Army Research Laboratory announced that they had created a tiny fly drone of comparable size to the robofly with wings made of lead zirconium titanate.

But creating a miniature flying machine isn’t as simple as creating something that can take off and land while attached to a wire. There’s more that goes into flight than pure mechanics. It takes brains. Ron Polcawich, head of the Army Research Lab's piezoelectric microelectromechanical systems, or PiezoMEMS team, says it may take another 15 years of research before fly drones can move through the air, land and behave like real bugs.

Supposedly, the world’s smallest drone comes from Harvard at 60 milligrams and 3 centimeters. The military is working on a version that’s three times smaller.

In this paper titled Towards Autonomous Navigation of Miniature UAV , a group of researchers from NASA, IEEE and other outfits describe the high level of difficulty in getting a machine that’s the size of an insect to actually think like one, much less think like a bird.

“A major algorithmic challenge is to process sensor information at a high rate to provide vehicle control and higher level tasks with real-time position information and vehicle states.”

Why is it such a challenge to make a tiny drone locate itself in space and decide on a destination? Because a flying machine that size doesn’t have much room to carry a computer capable of crunching all the visual data (from a camera) that it needs for flight, especially if it’s also going to carry a battery as well. “Since micro rotorcrafts can only carry a few grams of payload including batteries, this has to be accomplished with a very small weight and power budget… Additionally, novel algorithmic implementations with minimal computational complexity, such as presented in this paper, are required,” they write.

The paper demonstrates an autonomous algorithmic flying solution for a quadcopter of a much more bird-sized 12 grams. No, it doesn’t solve the problem of teaching a computer the size of a golf ball to see, dodge obstacles in the air and land on a dime, but it does provide an idea of where research is headed.

“The implementation on an ultra-light weight platform of only 12g is a huge step towards ultimately having a fully capable avionics package (flight computer, camera, and IMU) under 15g. It will enable fully autonomous control of ultrasmall quadrotor systems (as e.g. the 15cm, 25g Bitcraze miniature quadrotor system) that can be deployed for indoor and outdoor [intelligence search and reconaissance] missions in confined spaces while maintaining stealth.”

If progress in machine vision algorithms continues at its current rate that 15-year forecast until the flight of the flying robot insects may be conservative.