Recently featured on The Gadget Show, the Microdrone from German company Microdrones GmbH appears to have been in production for a few years now, since 2005 according to their website. It is a flying spy camera, mounted on a helicopter of sorts, powered by four rotor blades. Watching some of the manufacturers videos on YouTube this appears to enable the Microdrone to hover levelly at great heights, feeding back video of astounding clarity and stability.
Although the videos tend to show this as a remote control device, it is apparently steering itself using GPS, which makes it useful for anything from aerial photography to traffic monitoring in the twenty minutes air time the Microdrone has. Back in September 2007 British police forces were rumoured to be trying these out, although I haven’t found anything to suggest if they’re still in use or not. However the manufacturers website does suggest their usage in ‘Aerial photography, Archeology, Surveillance, Plant inspection, Fire and Rescue service, Border control, Police, Special forces, [and the] Army.’
It doesn’t look like Joe Public can go out and buy his own Microdrone (at least not without a hefty sum of money- £1000 a month is an estimate for a lease to use them in the police force) so it may be a while before you can spy on your neighbours in the back garden, but it might be that if they’re not in use already for surveillance then they could be at some point. Now, of course, this provokes a bit of a moral dilemma. On one hand, you can see how much of a boon they’d be to the emergency services- sending a robot in to search an unstable burning building is safer than sending in a person for example- but the video above focuses a scary amount on hovering beside peoples windows, and drops pretences entirely with an extended hover over a sunbathing woman. A more pessimistic blogger may point out the invasion of privacy this could imply. Big Brother may have just found his eye in the sky.
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