These are about as practicable as developing lightsabers. They are:
1. Difficult to build. It's proving incredibly hard to achieve any decent range for electrical road vehicles. This multiplies manifold when trying to cram components into a much smaller space and make the whole thing fly.
2. Difficult to control. Gusts of wind, predatory birds, reliable bandwidth etc.
3. Trivially easy to defend against. Think mosquito nets, burqas and cheap radio jammers.
Mosquitoes are an apt analogy: however, I don't think the analogy is to the detriment of legitimate fear of these.
Mosquitoes have not only overcome those technical obstacles, but thrived as a species. They even manage to kill millions of people a year, inadvertently. Obviously you can't sweep everything difficult about utilizing these bug-drones under the rug as just questions of implementation, but it's pretty clear that they're not inherently unfeasible.
We can't even build an amoeba, much less a mosquito. Heck, we can't even take an existing mosquito and make it fly where we want while transmitting video.
1. I believe that was addressed in the video. These are very short range devices that can be recharged by solar energy or by sitting on power lines.
2. See the video.
3. You might be able to deny access to buildings with mosquito nets but you're not going to stop close range surveillance, painting targets and other uses. Mosquito nets themselves would be relatively trivial to dismantle with a swarm of these (you'd only need to land one with explosives on the net).
1. The short range is a killer. You already need to know where the bad guys are, within an area of a few blocks. And solar panels with such small form factor are a joke in comparison with the energy demands of powered flight. (Sure, there are solar powered drones, but they need huge wings, perfect weather, and are little more than powered gliders.)
2. I didn't see any good counter-arguments there. Care to detail.
3. Explosions will alert the building's occupants, and you just sacrificed a complex, expensive device for a $0.50 mosquito net.
but those problems were just talked about, not solved. This is the US government we're talking about, so I bet they will never get far, and by the time they have something operational, you'll be able to but something 10x better on Amazon.
The US government also envisioned and funded the development of computer networking (though the actual work was done by companies), so it's ironic for someone to imply the government can't innovate on an internet forum.
I say this as someone who's basically libertarian.
Inductive charging. And, in addition to dedicated stations, I understand there is work being done to enable this to occur parasitically, e.g. from power lines / distribution networks.
1. Difficult to build. It's proving incredibly hard to achieve any decent range for electrical road vehicles. This multiplies manifold when trying to cram components into a much smaller space and make the whole thing fly.
2. Difficult to control. Gusts of wind, predatory birds, reliable bandwidth etc.
3. Trivially easy to defend against. Think mosquito nets, burqas and cheap radio jammers.