Someone may have encountered drones that behave like bees, but a bee-sized drone is a different matter entirely. But how can you ensure its orientation in space, when practically even the smallest computing device will be too heavy and energy-consuming for a tiny bot? The only way out is to make the chip incredibly tiny. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new navigation chip called Navion - very small (only about 0.2 square centimeters), but powerful (24 milliwatts) - that can be placed in a drone the size of a bee, and that's enough power to process images from a camera at a speed of 171 frames per second.
Meanwhile, this development is a development of a previously known concept. In previous works of engineers, a similar design was used, but it used a "massive" 2W chip. Researchers at MIT built Navion from the ground up and partially reduced power consumption by minimizing the amount of data stored on the chips at any given time, maximizing their flow. They have gone to the extreme by removing math with zero values. All of these efforts have helped reduce the required memory from 2MB to 0.8MB, resulting in even greater savings in size and power.
But don't wait for photos of the flying bee drone just yet. The first thing the researchers want to do is test the chip on a miniature racing car, then on a regular drone, and only then on a mini-drone. It is important that this technology is not limited to flying bots. It can be used in smart tablets that go where they need to go, or in the long run in any device that needs to work for a very long time on a single battery charge.
Sergey Lukavsky