Drone spins into a ghostly blur, making it almost invisible

Most attempts to hide a drone tinker with how it looks - camouflage, transparent shells, light-bending optics. Northwestern University engineers went the other way and changed how your eyes see it. Their prototype, the "Phantom Twist," spins up to 25 times a second, too fast for the eye to track, so the whole aircraft smears into a ghostly blur that all but disappears against whatever's behind it. By one visibility metric it's about 10 times less noticeable than a conventional quadcopter.

A normal quadcopter has four rotors bolted to a body that stays put. Phantom Twist has one motor and one propeller turning in one direction while the rest of the drone turns in the other. "For our drone, the whole thing is rotating, so there are no stationary parts," said Michael Rubenstein. Nearly every component is transparent, so its handful of solid parts - motor, circuit board, counterweight, batteries - visually average against the background instead of standing out as a shape.

To arrive at that design, the team had a computer generate roughly 20,000 configurations capable of stable flight, then let AI rearrange the parts over and over to minimize how visible the drone was from every angle. It isn't finished yet: the propeller is still audible, and wires and support rods stay faintly visible. The eventual goal is drones that can monitor wildlife or inspect infrastructure without drawing attention.

Previously:

• Flying microchip with wings to monitor air pollution and airborne diseases

• MIT built a swarm of tiny robotic flies to pollinate flowers like bees

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