Abstract
Sociotechnical Synthesis
Introduction
The two projects in this portfolio are connected not just by subject matter but by a tension that runs through both of them: the same qualities that make a dragonfly-inspired drone scientifically interesting are precisely what make it ethically complicated. The technical capstone project, ICARUS-1, involved designing and building a small, lightweight, four-winged unmanned aerial system that mimics the flight mechanics of a dragonfly. The STS research paper, “Biomimetic UAVs and the Ethics of Surveillance: Privacy, Design, and Responsibility in Aerospace Engineering,” examines how drones with exactly those characteristics, namely small scale, high maneuverability, and the ability to blend into natural surroundings, are expanding the conditions under which aerial surveillance can occur while existing laws and ethical frameworks struggle to keep up. The connection between the two projects is direct and intentional: I was simultaneously building the kind of drone my STS paper was warning about.
That overlap shaped how I thought about both projects throughout the year. On the technical side, the team was working to make ICARUS-1 as light and capable as possible, pushing the prototype toward a total weight of around 111 grams, well under the 250-gram FAA threshold that exempts small drones from registration and remote identification requirements. One of the project’s secondary objectives was to eventually integrate a live video camera into the system. In isolation, that is simply a useful engineering feature for a reconnaissance or search-and-rescue platform. But reading the STS literature on drone surveillance at the same time made it impossible to treat that camera objective as a neutral design choice. A sub-250-gram drone with a live camera feed, four independently controlled wings that allow it to hover silently in place, and a physical profile that resembles a large insect is not just a research prototype. It is a system with significant surveillance potential, and the very features that make it exciting from an engineering standpoint are the features that raise the sharpest ethical questions.
The STS paper argues that biomimetic drones represent a qualitative shift in surveillance capability because they operate in ways that people are not conditioned to recognize as threatening. A conventional quadcopter is loud, visually distinct, and immediately identifiable as a drone. A dragonfly-sized or dragonfly-shaped aircraft is not. This gap between capability and recognizability is where privacy frameworks break down, and it is a gap that engineers creating these systems are directly responsible for widening or narrowing through their design decisions. Working on ICARUS-1 gave that argument a concreteness it would not have had otherwise. Every design choice the team made, from how quiet the flapping mechanism would be to how much payload mass to reserve, was also, in a meaningful sense, a choice about what the system could be used for. The two projects, taken together, made it difficult to think about engineering and ethics as separate conversations. They are the same conversation, approached from different directions.
Summary of the Technical Capstone Project
ICARUS-1 was a year-long effort to design, fabricate, and bench-test a dragonfly-inspired unmanned aerial system with four independently actuated flapping wings. The project was motivated by a genuine gap in existing drone technology: fixed-wing aircraft are efficient but cannot hover, while multirotor systems can hover but burn through battery power quickly and are limited in tight spaces. Dragonflies navigate both constraints in nature through a combination of independent wing control and unsteady aerodynamic mechanisms that generate far more lift per unit of energy than conventional propeller-driven flight. The team set out to replicate that approach in an engineered system, with three primary objectives: build a functional four-wing prototype, achieve stable aerial maneuvers including hovering and forward flight, and demonstrate true independent actuation of each wing rather than the simplified paired configurations used in most existing bio-inspired platforms.
The project involved concurrent development across mechanical, electrical, and software subsystems. The wings themselves went through multiple full redesigns. Early iterations used 3D-printed frames that were too heavy for the motors to flap at the frequencies needed for lift. The final design abandoned the printed frame entirely in favor of thin carbon fiber rods sandwiched between a lightweight metallic film, bringing each wing’s mass down from nearly four grams to just over half a gram, an eighty-six percent reduction. The motors also changed substantially during development. The original brushless motors produced large, unpredictable current spikes under the oscillating load of the flapping mechanism and were replaced midway through the project with brushed gearmotors that sacrificed some raw performance for stability under real operating conditions. A custom printed circuit board was designed to consolidate all motor drivers, the inertial measurement unit, and power regulation into a single compact package appropriate for a vehicle of this size.
The control system was one of the most technically involved aspects of the project. Because flapping-wing aerodynamics are inherently unsteady and difficult to model precisely, the team implemented an Active Disturbance Rejection Control framework that does not rely on a perfect mathematical model of the drone to maintain stability. Instead, it continuously estimates and compensates for whatever forces are acting on the vehicle in real time. This controller was validated extensively in a physics simulation environment adapted from an open-source flapping-wing robot simulator, where the virtual drone demonstrated stable hover and the expected relationships between wing speed and vehicle attitude. The assembled physical prototype came in at approximately 111 grams, leaving a meaningful mass reserve for future additions. Transferring the control system to the physical hardware and achieving free flight remained the primary objective for the next iteration of the capstone team.
Summary of the STS Research Paper
The STS research paper examines how biomimetic insect-inspired drones are changing the landscape of aerial surveillance and why existing regulatory and ethical frameworks are not equipped to manage that change. The paper is organized around a central argument: that the technical capabilities which make biomimetic UAVs valuable for legitimate purposes, including their small size, quiet operation, environmental blending, and ability to navigate confined spaces, simultaneously make them effective surveillance tools in ways that traditional drone regulations were never designed to address. Because these systems can operate without being recognized as drones at all, the social norms and legal expectations that govern when and whether someone is being observed do not apply to them in any straightforward way.
The paper reviews existing UAV governance frameworks and finds that they are oriented primarily around airspace safety rather than privacy. Registration requirements, operational restrictions, and remote identification mandates all focus on managing where drones fly and who is accountable for them, but they do not meaningfully constrain what data a drone collects or how it is used. Remote identification systems, which were introduced in part to improve transparency, introduce their own complications by broadcasting sensitive information about operators that can itself be exploited. The paper draws on comparative policy analysis and security research to argue that regulation consistently lags behind technical development and that biomimetic UAVs, which are particularly difficult to detect and therefore to regulate, represent an especially acute version of that problem.
The paper’s concluding argument is that this regulatory gap shifts meaningful ethical responsibility onto engineers during the design process. Drawing on responsible innovation frameworks, the concept of capability caution, and Langdon Winner’s foundational argument that technological artifacts embody political values, the paper contends that choices made during design, including how visible a drone is made, what sensing capabilities are built in, and how data is handled, are not neutral. They determine what kinds of surveillance become possible and who bears the costs. The paper calls for a privacy-by-design approach in which engineers treat surveillance risk as a design constraint from the outset rather than leaving it for policy to address after deployment.
Concluding Reflection
Working on both projects at once produced a kind of intellectual friction that made each one more honest. The STS paper was sharper because the technical project kept it grounded and when the paper argued that engineers developing biomimetic drones should treat privacy as a design constraint, that was not an abstract claim for me. It was a claim I had to sit with while simultaneously deciding how much payload mass to budget for a camera module and reading scholarship on how drone surveillance erodes consent. The capstone, in turn, benefited from being held up against the STS literature throughout development, not just in retrospect. Questions about the intended future users of ICARUS-1, the conditions under which a search-and-rescue platform might be repurposed, and the ethics of designing a system specifically intended to be hard to detect were questions the STS research made it difficult to defer. The two projects did not resolve those tensions so much as they made them visible, and that, more than any individual finding from either project, feels like the most important thing the portfolio as a whole has to offer.
Notes
School of Engineering and Applied Science
Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering
Technical Advisor: Haibo Dong
STS Advisor: MC Forelle
Technical Team Members: Lily Byers, Kathryn Geoffroy, Theodore LengKong, Jafar Mansoor, Justin Matara, Owen McKenney, Andrew Mercer, Jeremiah Nubbe, Nicholas Owen, Mark Piatko, Luis Ramos-Garcia, James Scullin, Matthew Sendi, George Zach
