Smallest autonomous flying robot

The smallest drone capable of autonomous flight and navigation is the Delfly Explorer, developed at the Aerospace Engineering Department at TU Delft (NLD) and publicly demonstrated in June 2014. The robot has a 28-cm (11-inch) wingspan and weighs just 20 grams (0.7 oz), including a 4-gram binocular vision system and the associated image-processing hardware.

The Delfly Explorer is the fourth generation of untethered flying robots created by the Delfly team. The previous generation had onboard cameras, but the collision avoidance and navigation processing had to be handled by a separate computer that was linked over a wireless network. The explorer has an improved camera system and, more importantly, the image processing and navigation is now handled by an onboard microcontroller. All of these systems are powered by an on-board battery that allows for up to nine minutes of autonomous controlled flight.

In the future, small camera-equipped drones such as Delfly could be used in search-and-rescue scenarios, entering collapsed buildings to search for people trapped inside. Their relatively simple hardware and lightweight construction would allow them to be treated as a disposable resource that could be deployed in swarms.