This flying robot has been designed and created by US-German team very recently. Their goal was to make this robot automatically navigate inside a simulated nuclear plant and find and image a control panel without the aid of the GPS. This robot has been named as the Pelican based on a hardware designed by the German company Ascending Technologies. The programming team for this robot is from MIT. This technology and the robot netted a $10,000 prize at the International Aerial Robotics Competition. The Pelican is a micro air vehicle (MAV) with a quadrotor design, using four propellers on a carbon-fiber frame for lift and control. It maps hallways and rooms with a 32-yard-range laser scanner and stereo cameras while wirelessly reporting its progress to off board computers. The location and mapping algorithm was implemented by the MIT team.

The IARC proposed challenges that cannot be met with current technology, military or otherwise. The next mission will be where the MAVs will have to penetrate a simulated security compound, steal a flash drive, replace it with a fake one and escape undetected. They still sound like a thousand mosquitoes otherwise we will a whole slate of spy agencies falling apart.

[Cnet]