Micro air vehicle

Development is driven by commercial, research, government, and military organizations;[citation needed] with insect-sized aircraft reportedly expected in the future.

Ruijsink says the purpose of these crafts is to understand insect flight and to provide practical uses, such as flying through cracks in concrete to search for earthquake victims or exploring radioactivity-contaminated buildings.

The device was also deployed at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan to provide video and radioactivity readings after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.

[10] In early 2008, Honeywell received FAA approval to operate its MAV, designated as gMAV in the national airspace on an experimental basis.

It was originally developed as part of a DARPA program, and its initial application is expected to be with the police department of Miami-Dade County, Florida.

[11] In January 2010, Tamkang University (TKU) in Taiwan realized autonomous control of flight altitude of an 8-gram, 20-centimeter wide, flapping-wing MAV.

In 2012, the British Army deployed the sixteen gram Black Hornet Nano Unmanned Air Vehicle to Afghanistan to support infantry operations.

[14][15] Although there are currently no true MAVs (i.e., truly micro scaled flyers) in existence, DARPA has attempted a program to develop even smaller Nano Air Vehicles (NAVs) with a wingspan of 7.5 centimeters.

One such device, which has been designed from its inception as a fully autonomous MAV, is the biologically-inspired Entomopter originally developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology under a DARPA contract by Robert C.

Solar-powered MAVs are a potential solution, but payload capacity and poor trade-offs between lift generation and power efficiency reduce their viability.

A ground mobility and perching mechanism inspired from bird claws was recently developed by Vishwa Robotics and MIT and sponsored by US Air Force Research Laboratory.