Northwestern University researchers have unveiled the Phantom Twist, a drone designed to be extremely difficult for people to see in flight. By spinning its body and propeller in opposite directions at up to 25 rotations per second, it exploits limits in human motion perception and appears as a faint blur rather than a recognisable aircraft. The work matters because it offers a new approach to low-visibility drone design based on how people see movement, rather than camouflage alone.

The team says the prototype is roughly ten times less visible than a conventional quadcopter, though it is not fully invisible: its wires and support rods can still be seen, and its spinning produces an audible whir. Researchers used an automated process that generated 20,000 designs, refined the 500 least visible through AI-assisted modelling and tested candidates against simulated landscapes before building the final drone. The project, partly funded by the US National Science Foundation, was presented at the Robotics: Science and Systems conference in Sydney.