Drones: now invisible, in a weird way!

Thanks to my friend Darlene for pointing me to this article! I’ve talked a lot about invisibility on this blog and have written papers on invisibility physics and even written a book on the history of invisibility physics, but still there are fun new discoveries that surprise me in a fun way! Take, for example, the recent news from Northwestern University that engineers there have made a small drone that is, if not invisible, pretty dang hard to see while in flight! Their video of the “Phantom Twist” drone is quite spectacular. The drone relies on motion blur, in which a rapidly vibrating of spinning object can appear transparent simply because enough light passes through every location where the object would otherwise block it, and the object is spinning too quickly for the human eye to follow its motion. The drone itself is mostly thin sticks held together, which in motion become very hard to see. The engineering team used machine learning (an actual useful form of AI) to optimize…