Drone technology is advancing at an impressive pace. I think we're going to see some interesting (and terrifying) applications.
For example: Add some face detection software, then change the payload to a laser dazzler and pepper spray cartridge. Now you have a drone that can temporarily incapacitate people. When these get cheaper (say $100 per unit), a police department could buy a swarm of 1,000 for $100k. Whenever a riot breaks out, just unleash the drones (geofenced to the desired area). Instant crowd control.
to be honest all you see there are features of the APM, which is also sold by 3DR and developed by open source enthusiasts + 3DR.
The features have been there for a couple of years now albeit they've been improved and made more and more reliable over time.
That includes stuff like follow me (follows phone gps coordinates) auto land, auto return to home point, etc.
I've had an APM board (well, many APM boards really) along other boards for flight control since many years.
Now they sell is as a board called PX4 which is more powerful but uses the same software (but should evolve into something better than the APM).
In reality tho stuff like follow me doesnt work as well as on the video. The short 3s extracts are best case scenarios.
The main issue is that it cannot track the subject (no image recognition) so it really just follow some gps location and hopefully the camera is aligned (it auto aligns it depending on the trajectory, else you need a copilot to care for the camera).
Funny trivia, a large amount of kick starter projects with their "awesome" return to home, follow me, etc are using the APM board and the APM is the only reason they even get support... except the APM is free/opensource hard and software.
DJI being an exception, but their board isnt as full featured as the APM/PX4...
Finally, remember that these helicopters fly for about 15min and are still relatively prone to failure and interference. we're far from reliable large scale reliable delivery, mass governmental use, etc.
It’s very easy to take down a drone. And I don’t mean shoot it down with an assault rifle. You could even take it down with a sophisticated slingshot once it’s in a low altitude. And in order to tase or spray someone it has to get really low. These things are very slow and not that agile.
For sure. Laserpointer to blind it, jam gps to confuse it...
> And in order to tase or spray someone it has to get really low.
For tasing, sure. And for spraying an individual in the face. But if we're talking swarm-based crowd control, there might be other options. Anything bad that drops down (say 1000 minature cs-cannisters -- effective even if a few are "thrown back", other gas that is heavier than air, perhaps created by blending two components "on board" the drone, perhaps forms of acid or irritants liquids that are arezol'ed with pressure... audio-attacks...
In fact, swarm based drones might even be hard to take out, if they could rely on low-bandwidth, near-field comms, such as IR, lasers, (directional) ultrasound or whatnot. Not even sure if there's much current research in combining directional ultrasound with the type of advanced coding that is used for high-bandwidth radio short-wave/microwave comms.
You’re talking science fiction now. If it becomes so small as a fly how on earth would it be energy sufficient? With a battery? And that battery will hold enough energy not only to keep it flying but also to provide for a taser that could incapacitate an individual? And at that size it should also carry some communication infrastructure to receive instructions from a command center, a gps, and a cpu capable of running face recognition or even detect movement patterns because otherwise you can’t have efficient crowd control. Sure, in a couple of generations we’ll get there, but not in the immediate future.
It goes the other way as well: using a drone to commit arson or even an assassination (mounting a weapon is well within the weight profiles of many current devices), is something that is inevitable. Drones have range deniability for things like ransom pickups as well.
As an aside, I expect anti-drone systems to become a significant debate soon enough (e.g. if there's a drone peeping in my windows, what rights do I have to disable it?), and then to become a significant commercial concern.
Drones are less practical than existing tools for most everything you just listed.
For peeping in windows, a drone is extremely impractical. A telescope will yield much better results. The only thing a drone can better do is look down at your roof, or over your fence if your fence is higher than nearby buildings.
For assassination, traditional tools are clearly more practical in nearly every case. A hunting rifle at a few hundred meters is going to be a heck of a lot cheaper, more reliable, easier to use, and more difficult to trace than some drone with a mounted weapon.
I don't really know how arsonists generally do their thing, but I can't imagine that dropping something flammable is more practical than just driving by and throwing it.
I'm sure there are very specific cases where sophisticated drone usage could be useful for committing these crimes, but I don't think it's a major concern, and not even one of the biggest concerns of drones.
You seem to be only considering the moment of crime and disregarding what happens before and after it. A tool that almost completely removes risk of getting caught and need for alibi will surely be seen as more practical by all except mad and ridiculously dumb people, regardless of how less effective it is.
A drone leaves all that bomb trace leaves and more - its construction, hair skin and dna traces of the builder, even its radio control details. So its not perfect; its more like leaving the rifle at the scene.
And the idea that shooting a gun brings down some hailstorm of official response is myth. Fire a gun in most places and ... nothing will happen. Folks will rush to the scene of any murder, but will only find the sniper's location after hours or days of investigation. It won't be like the NCIS show where the investigator glances around and says 'must have come from that rooftop; its the only secure sniper post in a half-mile!' You can shoot from nearly anywhere with line-of-sight, from the partly-open door of a parked delivery van, without much risk of discovery.
I considered the likelihood of getting caught as well. I mentioned that explicitly in the rifle example. It's fairly obvious for the telescope example. For arson, again, I don't know much about how arson tends to be committed, but it seems that a drone is not inherently harder to track than a car, bicycle, or person on foot, given the range, speed, reliability, and conspicuousness of those modes of transportation.
A drone with a gun is unrealistic, I think. The stability of a light, air-borne vehicle is just not good enough. A drone with fragmentation grenades, on the other hand, could work well and pretty much erase all evidence.
I'm mostly commenting because I think the "small drone with a gun" idea is interesting; no idea how it would play out in practice.
If you had a drone with a weapon, I would think you'd want to fire on someone using some variation of Tracking Point style hardware [1], except partially self aimed. Basically see the target, paint the target, drone uses internal sensors to detect a brief instant of random stability and fires the weapon
On the show Sons of guns, they already made a drone that can shoot a pistol. Not very hard to do. Drones can withstand very high winds and hold position very easily, lots of hand guns have very little recoil and can easily be shot from a drone with very good accuracy.
Fragmentation grenades are presumably fairly difficult to come by. I think it's laughable to worry about an autonomous or remotely piloted drone assassinating people with fragmentation grenades when a normal firearm operated by a human is extremely practical and seems to work well enough. The latter is designed for nearly that exact purpose, and refined over centuries. They're cheap, easy to use, easy to get (in some places), and reliable.
when a normal firearm operated by a human is extremely practical
Again, doing a crime and getting away with a crime are two enormously different things. The truth is that the majority of humanity can commit terrible crimes with utter ease. There is absolutely no question about that.
Most of us don't, however, because of morality and our nature. The rest don't because they don't want to spend the rest of their life in jail, and for major crimes the probability of getting caught is enormously high. Things that reduce that probability (and a device that means you don't have to be on or even near the site, and can extract 100% of evidence with a very high degree of success, does that) open up opportunities for people to do such crimes.
As a parallel, someone mentioned bitcoins, and bitcoins absolutely opened up the world of casual extortion, because suddenly you don't have to go to a mailbox or meet in a park.
Fingerprints, hair or clothing samples, asking nearby drone hobbyists if they might know anyone into drones who might want to murder the victim, sales records of retailers of drones or drone supplies, and of course the normal stuff, like who would want the victim killed in the first place.
I'm not a detective, but I suspect having the large, complex piece of electronic equipment that was used as the weapon would be a godsend compared to the evidence available in a normal murder or assassination investigation.
Obviously the plan wouldn't be "drop the drone at the scene of the crime". Why would anyone ever do that? I mean, of course they would minimize the reveal were that to happen (though note that drones are becoming absolutely pedestrian, so this notion that you talk to the niche club and find the drone enthusiast is absurd), but the rational plan would be that the drone would escape as well. Because its odds of escape, currently, barring mechanical defect, would be close to 100%. No one is going to catch a drone.
Perhaps. But a wlan card taken from a discarded/stolen/recyled/used corporate machine, then transported half-around the globe and sold for cash, isn't necessarily easy to trace back to a perpetrator.
"For peeping in windows, a drone is extremely impractical. A telescope will yield much better results."
I'm not sure I agree with this at all. Drones allow you to access viewpoints that are otherwise impossible using telescopes at a fraction of the overall cost.
> A hunting rifle at a few hundred meters is going to be a heck of a lot cheaper, more reliable, easier to use, and more difficult to trace than some drone with a mounted weapon.
Perhaps, but you've still got to pay the guy holding the rifle. A drone could self-terminate. Most parts can be 3D-printed & assembled in a clean tent, untraceable. The most expensive part is possibly the infrared camera ($1~2k).
> For peeping in windows, a drone is extremely impractical.
Well, say I set up a drone for remote control over the internet, then rent it out to people that are located half around the globe. I act as a cut out, and whomever is spying will (may[1]) be hard to track.
[1] If I'm getting paid, there's the issue of anonymous transactions, and as for control, latency might be too high to use Tor -- but the main point is that drones already facilitate something new, if not revolutionary new.
I think the biggest 'benefit' to having a drone perform these tasks is the fact a robot is carrying out the task.
For example, instructing a drone to assassinate is potentially closer to hiring a hitman, than murdering someone firsthand with a shotgun. Closer in the sense that the puportrator feels a sense of detachment.
As hamstergene mentioned, drones are the before and after risk abatement.
A hunting rifle at a few hundred meters is going to be a heck of a lot cheaper, more reliable, easier to use, and more difficult to trace than some drone with a mounted weapon.
Aside from the difficulty of a few hundred meter shot in urban settings, shooting a weapon from a location announces where you are, exactly when you are there. Aside from the immediate and overwhelming response likely, the human traces would be enormous and unavailable. A drone, in contrast, comes from some unknown place off in some unknown direction, can with ease get anywhere near the target (on a nearby roof for instance), and then when the task is complete it can go low and fast and get back to a drop-off. For arson and peeping, the same premise holds -- a drone can go to exactly where is needed, do what is necessary, and get away with, currently, essentially zero risk of capture.
Will we eventually have drone registrations and tracking systems, comprehensive urban radio tracking and announcement, police overrides, etc? Yeah, probably, which was what I was getting at -- events will inevitably happen, and regulations will adjust.
These types of assassinations don't seem to happen very often, so there probably isn't much actual data. But I would expect that a single shot of a rifle is quite difficult to pinpoint, especially in an urban setting. There are audio gunfire locators that some cities have, but even then, the assassin can be long gone by the time anyone could respond. Just drive a car into a nearby parking garage, do the thing, and leave. For a drone operation, the setup and "mission" time is almost certainly much longer. I don't think we're anywhere near fully autonomous missions that could assassinate with any appreciable reliability, so you're going to need to fly line of sight (very impractical because of the range) or FPV (still impractical because of the required skill, equipment and mission time).
Could a professional band of assassins pull off an assassination with a drone? Certainly. Would it be far easier to just use a rifle? I'd say absolutely.
It’s only a matter of time before state and municipal governments start moving en masse to regulate civil drones – which is why there probably needs to be an association of some sort (is there one?) to get out in front and start the conversation in the right place.
I could imagine license tags being one outcome of this process: If a drone goes spying outside your window or damages your property, you now have a fairly simple recourse of reporting that tag number. The existence of this recourse would also go a long way toward making civil drone use less scary and more socially acceptable.
There is AUVSI http://www.auvsi.org/auvsi/home/ (Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International). I don't exactly know how effective they are what they do or even what they do, for that matter. They do seem to come up a lot in these drone issues, but their Wikipedia page appears to be self-written.
There may need to be something more than that; a "drone lobby" perhaps?
The AUVSI is known for generally representing more of the traditional military-industrial side of the drone business than the smaller, more entrepreneurial side. E.g. see their corporate membership list, which includes Boeing, General Atomics, Lockheed, Northrup Grumman, Rockwell & Saab (along with newer members like Google & Amazon) at the "Diamond Level": http://www.auvsi.org/membershipandchapters/corporatemembers
The Silicon Valley chapter of the AUVSI is more progressive with regard to small business drone advocacy, but it's hard to tell if that is having an impact nationally.
Agreed. Murders/assassinations via drone, with no hope of determining who did it, are coming sooner than later. Drug cartels, street gangs, etc. can already easily afford a weaponized drone - they just may not (yet) know how to obtain/build one.
The ability to anonymously open fire on virtually any target one chooses is a scary reality, but it's almost here. With no risk of prosecution, murders will happen that never would have happened before. Be nice to your neighbors :) .
Your rights probably are limited to calling the police, like pretty much any other non-immediate danger legal situation that involve applying the use of force.
Ok maybe yes, not probably, but if they do call the police, are you going to admit to destroying their thing? Are you sure you're going to be in the clear there? Why take that risk?
Who will do what? Commiserate with you over the phone. I'd get a butterfly net or a paintball gun, take the thing out, and dump it in the trash compactor. Who's going to come demanding the thing? What can they say? "When I was flying my gadget illegally in your airspace, you damaged it!" to which you reply "Lets go down to the station and work this out".
I'm pretty sure the police will come by if you call them, that's their job. There may be the chance that they're all busy dealing with more important things, but they will come, if only to come and take a police report.
I support Bitcoins and disagree with most of the arguments that they promote criminality, but I have to admit that collecting a ransom would be much easier by accepting it as Bitcoin (or other alternative cryptocurrencies, some of them much more anonymous than Bitcoin).
Lots of "ransomware" malware out there is already using this tactic, and law enforcement have no money to follow.
I think there should be a centralized tracking system for drones, and each drone should have a unique cryptographic identifier, so you always know who made the drone and who owned it.
Then, while you still won't be able to stop assassinations and such, just like you can't stop them now anyway, you can at least know who did it, and punish them afterwards.
Huh? What makes you think criminals will be sure to use a drone with such an ID system? There are no unique parts to a drone. Other than the motor controller and motors, it's mostly cellphone parts. Motors and controller have several other applications.
Maybe have each drone regularly broadcast their GPS's most recent NMEA sentence (latitude, longitude, timestamp, altitude, etc.) signed with their public key?
That's what came up with after thinking about it for a bit. There's probably a better solution out there.
> Then, while you still won't be able to stop assassinations and such, just like you can't stop them now anyway, you can at least know who did it
Even if you get criminals to comply as far as only operating drones with proper IDs, so that you can trace the legal purchase history of a drone, that doesn't mean you know who used the drone. Drones and their supporting control equipment can be stolen (and the owners prevented by force from reporting the theft) and people willing to commit assassination by drone certainly wouldn't be unwilling to commit theft, kidnapping, and/or murder of drone owners to acheive that.
There's little to prevent construction of unlicensed drones. Like they say, make operating drones illegal, and only criminals will have drones. And they can be made simply with mail-order parts.
Probably we're just going to have to get used to drones being around. Like we got used to cities and crowds on public streets and horseless carriages. This paranoia about drones will be seen by future historians as quaint.
Do you expect to be able to regulate the electronics industry that tightly? You'd need some universal DRM system implemented in every accelerometer, GPS module, electric motor, and microcontroller.
I didn't want to put too much speculation in my comment, but you're right that there are a ton of things that individuals could do with drones.
Here's a movie plot attack: A week/month/etc beforehand, plant 4-8 drones a half-mile downrange of the airport a VIP is scheduled to fly out of. When their plane takes off, trigger the drones to fly into the the plane's turbines. A fully-loaded plane with no working engines would quickly stall and turn into a fireball on the ground. You might not even need explosive payloads for this to work.
Targeting something stationary at a location known well in advance would be even easier; like say, a podium at an outdoor speaking event. I wonder what speed an inverted drone, accelerating toward the ground, can get up to while controlling its impact location to within a foot. Might be that adding an explosive is largely superfluous in that situation too.
I don't think kamikaze drones are even remotely practical as weapons for assassination. You'll have big issues with accuracy, lethality, and the element of surprise. It could work, but I don't see any circumstances where a hunting rifle wouldn't be a far better tool in every aspect.
Drones are too slow to catch-up with a plane that's taking off. Not to mention the fact that those things are so fragile, the moment they get near a jet engine they will disintegrate.
The plane's future position can be accurately estimated as soon as it spools-up on the runway. So the drones wouldn't need to catch up, just fly up to intercept. To ensure turbine destruction, the drones could have a payload of ceramic ball bearings, explosives, or both.
A passenger plane taking off is going to have a hard time seeing (let alone avoiding) such small, maneuverable craft.
Of course, this is a movie plot threat. Really, nobody is going to spend the time and resources to program drones like that.
People associate drones with multicopters. But really they're UAVs.. or.. you know, what you call drones, and can also be planes.
small/cheap (800USD) electric powered planes can go about the same speed as an airliner at take off, that is, 400km/h.
any faster and it needs to be turbine powered.
Also you'd go the opposite way (toward the plane) so the speed dont matter much...
Now, good luck to aim for the turbine - for all turbines, at once.
The drones you buy at RC shops, yes.
Do a YouTube search for jet powered RC planes and you'll find several that exceed the takeoff speed of a commercial airliner.
Jet engines have to survive the Chicken Test, which is to throw a frozen chicken into the engine running at full speed. A drone would have to be made pretty chewy to stop a jet engine.
And then the plane just lands. They can fly with an engine out.
"The most pyrotechnic test of all requires that dynamite charges be strapped to the compressor blades and detonated while the engine is going full blast."
Good point, but I think this hasn't happened because almost nobody is a psychopath, and most psychopaths are incompetent. If I believed otherwise, I wouldn't speculate about these things publicly.
Also, it would be hard to pilot multiple RC planes or helicopters simultaneously. Any attack that requires people cooperating is much less likely.
Psychopaths have a wide range of traits, but I believe those who would consider doing something like this, also tend to have poor impulse control that may interfere with their plans ahead. What makes it a terrifying possibility is that terrorists, who I don't think are all psychopathic, may have a better chance of pulling it off.
Not to mention that the vast majority of people who would be willing and capable of pulling off such an attack are probably people in government, so government regulation wouldn't make sense as a recommendation.
The same can be said about almost any terrorist action. They're not generally limited by what is possible to do, but mostly by what people are willing to do. That something like this hasn't happened just shows that there just aren't that many crazy people out there.
RC Planes are far cheaper than drones and can fly FPV and have been around much longer than drones. They can also carry very large payloads as well. These whole what-if scenarios are good to hypothesize, but assassinations happen if they want to happen. They are not going to happen more because of drones.
I'm posting this just had a heads up. We bought the old model of this drone, the IRIS, and it had serious problems and they have very poor customer support. I've been waiting for at least two weeks for a call back from support.
The most serious of the problems was that the drone stopped working mid-flight causing it to fall 20 feet on to concrete. We were very fortunate that no one was standing under it.
Sorry to hear about that-our customer support usually resolves issues in a day. Please email me directly with your order details at chris@3drobotics.com and I'll escalate to manager to sort this out ASAP.
Just a random heads up that this may be an issue for 3DR that should be addressed to a wider audience.
I recently just bought a DJI Phantom 2 after a bit of decision paralysis. I really like the open nature of the 3DR product line (and the fact that it has a San Diego presence is great) and seriously considered the IRIS but after doing a lot of "forum research" bad customer support when a problem was hit was a very common theme.
I don't even know how "real" of a problem this is versus just being an echo chamber thing but it was pervasive enough that I figured I'd just buy the $600 Phantom 2 as a starter and then reassess if (well, almost certainly when) I start looking for something more than just a 'starter' drone.
This is what I believe will be a (perhaps minor) roadblock towards adoption of these devices. It's relatively cheap compared to what's on the market now and appears very high quality. The problem is that flying machines are not well suited to a sudden loss of control, with their best option being crashing straight down.
As an intermediate pilot myself, I'd be scared to fly anywhere near the style that the promo videos do - over open water, one mistake means your drone is taking a dive. More experienced flyers are used to the fact that flying machines crash and parts need replacing on a fairly regular basis no matter how carefully you fly. That's going to be a harder sell to people buying a complete package expecting awesome output like the promo videos.
Sometimes a propellor detaches mid-flight, or the battery unplugs due to some crazy vibration. Of course, it shouldn't happen in a good design, but users are careless and it only needs to happen once to cause a good crash.
Have you inspected the issue? One issue that makes me worry is the battery connections. These drones have a lot of vibration once they are in the air, and you need to check the battery wires before/after each recharge to make sure they solder is not broken etc.
I have just read in a drone magazine that it's a good idea to use drones with 8 rotors when carrying expensive cameras, because they are more resilient. Apparently with 3 or 4 rotors, the drone will inevitably fall down if one of them falls.
If you follow any DJI forums you'll find that the situation is not any better on that side. Anyone who's had to deal with their support is uniformly unhappy.
Current IRIS owner here. Looks like the IRIS+ still only includes a two-axis Tarot gimbal; while the gimbal _vastly_ improves image quality vs direct-mount, failure to stabilize yaw yields a fair amount of shake - I was hoping the IRIS+ would add 3D stabilization to offer full stabilization and was disappointed to see this wasn't the case. On the bright side, the battery pack is much bigger than on the IRIS (5100 mAh vs 3500mAh, which explains much of the flight time difference) and the long legs are now included by default weighing in at the same 1283g. The included follow-me mode is not very good unless it's been dramatically improved from ~3 months ago. Will be interesting to see how this ends up competing with RTF follow-me solutions from AirDog and Hexo+ next year.
Open question: How do you stop an assassin when the assassin is a poisonous robotic bumblebee?
What about one hundred poisonous robotic bumblebees?
You might think these unfeasible near term, but a drone that simply flies high and drops 300 dumb, poison-tipped flechettes (think capillary-powered syringe tips) is feasible today, isn't it?
(Sorry for the derail, I think the product looks great, I'm just commenting on the rapid development pace of drones so far, wondering what implications might be in another ten years)
I mean, let's talk about the fear around zeppelins. Zeppelins were used to bomb Paris in WW1[0], which wasn't that effective overall. By the time WW2 rolled around, we have the bombing Zeppelin 2.0 - the long range strategic bomber.
So I suppose what I'm saying is that, when people said "what will we do when they start using these huge flying things to attack us?" The answer was, "Nothing, your city is going to be destroyed." So maybe use another example of, "old FUD," because it seems like the people worried about Zeppelins were absolutely right. :)
It seems to be rare, especially when it comes to new science and technology. Sadly, with the military being such a large customer in these fields, we do end up with a lot of undesirable tech. The most effective way to reduce it is cut it off at the source (i.e. reduce military spending).
Looking through the specs the flight time is just 16-22 minutes. How close are we to some sort advancement in that area, as that seems to limit the possibilities somewhat?
> Is this a 'when batteries become magical' thing?
Basically, yes.
To get more power you need a bigger battery, but if you have a bigger battery you are carrying more weight and thus need more power, so you quickly reach a point of diminishing returns.
Batteries are improving (and stronger/lighter materials to build with are helping as well), but nowhere near the sort of Moore-ish improvement we are used to seeing in other places.
If you make it a lot bigger it flies a lot longer (40min for a 4kg multicopter for example )
If you make it an airplane it flies a heck of a lot longer (1 or 2 hours for a <1kg foam plane)
So yeah.. batteries need to get magical or our power usage efficiency needs to get way better.
Most build their own. Hybrids dont work well tho. Same problems as with the real scale hybrids.
its hard to get propellers that will give you a lot of vertical thrust then not kill the glide ratio while still propulsion your horizontally (ie forward) as well.
So some people simply have planes with vertical take off then the props rotate when you need to go faster/longer.
Thats a lot of mechs thus less reliable tho - at least so far. Also the props are huge and thus cause a lot of drag still. See the v22 osprey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtGjzbVb76U for ex.
Theres some experiments with covered props (but that lowers the efficiency at lower rotational speed) so that there is less friction when gliding forward.
Pretty much, the more magical (where magical=low weight + high capacity) the battery, the more flight time. At least on my fairly simple quad, the batteries are the most weighty item.
That makes sense. Are there any drones that combine that approach, i.e. like a V-22 Osprey? It seems like the 'modes' could be combined, weight willing..
There are plenty of custom-built VTOL models. Most are for fun (as is the case for the entire RC hobby), but I'm sure practical commercial ones could be built if there was really a market for them. Of course, small RC planes can have such ridiculous power to weight ratios and flight envelopes that the distances required for takeoff and landing can be very small.
If you're going to use the follow feature, it seems like it would be possible to run power cables down to a much larger battery in your backpack or something. Just an idea.
There are a lot of logistical reasons why this is a really bad idea, but here are a few quick ones off the top of my head:
1.) I assume people would want to record themselves doing something a bit more interesting than just walking in a wide open area at the same pace where 100' of cable can't get snagged on anything.
2.) Any sort of quick changes in direction are going to tug on the wire, at worst risking causing the drone to crash, at best causing the video to take you out of frame.
3.) If there's any sort of speed involved, the drag of that wire in the wind will eat up power.
4.) The weight of 100' of cable will add up quickly, especially if you want it to be robust enough to handle being snagged/tugged. You certainly don't want a break in the cable, because a sudden loss of power will be catastrophic.
The follow feature is killer. One day maybe when people go places drones will always follow, will really help for safety/documentation. For instance a trip into the Grand Canyon or a skiing trip if things went awry. Battery life, networking/communication distance needs to be much longer but there are so many possibilities. Maybe we'll see Russian videos with drones in addition to their dash cams that follow their drive.
I want one to tag along after my child as she plays outside, with a voice channel and geotracking (video channel only when she asks for it). True helicopter parenting.
Quadcopter parenting and all the interesting applications will require major improvements in battery capacity:weight ratio, though.
Shipping drones will up the battery time and weight they can carry. But ultimately it will probably be a team of drones when doing tasks, may not even be owned by the controller, rented eyes. New drones tagging in after 15 minutes from another location to complete a full view without battery problems. Drones will be everywhere.
How does inertial navigation help with following people for a flying camera platform? Even if the subject carries a sensor, the reference frames will drift unbounded.
Visual tracking should work, but is not reliable yet. Lots of people are working on it.
Right, I'm thinking of inertial navigation to help out in a case where you have spotty GPS and you lose it for 10 seconds. It's not practical for these sorts of applications to use only inertial nav, but it can help in the region between full GPS and no GPS.
it's definitely possible. but the price point for inertial sensors that are accurate enough to work without GPS is a lot higher than the price of the MEMS sensors that are currently used.
True. One thing you could do is have the drones map out areas using models and maybe even a few physical root points for them to base it on. Mapping it themselves something like this Dyson 360 vacuum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oguKCHP7jNQ
Airdog and many of the other "follow me" drone projects are based on the open source autopilot, Ardupilot [1], that 3DR heavily supports development of. The first really successful crowd funded drone, pocket drone [2], is going to start shipping soon as well. I'm hopeful the others like AirDog and HEXO+ [3] can pull it off as well. Hardware is pretty hard especially when it flies ;-)
If you are into this stuff and in the Bay Area sign up for the Meetup my Partner and I run [4]. The next one at the Amazon Prime Air offices but unfortunately is way wait listed.
I'm not using the drone, but we got the radios that 3drobotics designed and they're great. The firmware is written by Tridge (of Samba fame) and the arducopter people use it heavily.
why propellers on all these drones aren't shrouded? For VTOL/hovering machines the increased efficiency benefit usually more than covers the additional weight of the shroud/duct.
When I flew my parrot drone with the bumpers it was noticeably more sluggish, and a slight breeze would push it around. The instructions actually say to remove it for outdoors flight.
it depends on speed. Before some speed - increase which diminishes with increasing speed and going into the loss after that. So the best is for static thrust - VTOL/hover mode. The other commenter gave the explanation i think i was asking about.
does anyone know how these types of follow-me drones do with obstacle avoidance? do you just tell them to fly high enough that they avoid things by going over them?
They don't :). Its upto you to make sure it doesn't crash into anything. Its not a co-incidence that all the videos of this tech is shot in large open fields ;)
Obstacle avoidance is coming though! The research world is converging on a solution!
Obviously you can't. The geofence (as implemented in ArduPilot) is simply a safety measure; once the aircraft passes outside of a defined zone, it returns to a pre-determined waypoint inside the fence and waits for further pilot commands.
To answer the initial question, the latest versions of ArduPilot implement terrain following (based on terrain data loaded into the flight computer before-hand). Additionally, there is also now support for range-finding instruments like Lidar Lite [0], although I don't believe those are currently being used in the terrain following mode. Such instruments could conceivably be used to implement "look-ahead" functionality to more accurately avoid obstacles.
I'd been salivating at DJI Phantom II for a while and now this option looks even better because of ability program it + flight paths. One complaint I've is too much emphasis on GoPro. People already have iPhone 6 and other smartphones with much better camera and capabilities than GoPro. Why shouldn't be I able to attach it to gimble instead of burning another $300+? This could be a great selling point against DJI's Vision+ system because it would be net cheaper and better for most people.
ok.. may be not that better than Vision+. Gimble here is only 2D. Considering Phantom II Vision+ includes camera + 3D Gible at almost same price and it has 25min flight time, Phantom is probably still the better option.
You're comparing a very basic microquad that will easily fit in the palm of your hand with a quad with a 550mm frame, 20 minute flight time, and autonomous flight capability.
The 20 minute flight time is nothing to brag about... the much cheaper microquad apparently flies for 10 minutes. If you want a drone with real flight time, you need to go with a plane-type craft.
>I love the autonomous following, which I guess is the big reveal here.
I love it too, although the previous version of the IRIS had this feature as well.
I want someone to take the out put First Person View camera on the drone and port it to an Occulus Rift so you can walk around, viewing yourself in third person mode.
Check out Fat Shark video goggles - people have been doing this for a while now.
Using an Oculus Rift would be better with two cameras (to take advantage of the stereoscopic 3D) but would be difficult and expensive because the Rift is HDMI and corrects for chromatic aberration by requiring software to convolute the image.
That means you'd need to get the video from the cameras, to a PC, through the reverse-chromatic aberration kernel, and onto the Rift without introducing too much latency.
For example: Add some face detection software, then change the payload to a laser dazzler and pepper spray cartridge. Now you have a drone that can temporarily incapacitate people. When these get cheaper (say $100 per unit), a police department could buy a swarm of 1,000 for $100k. Whenever a riot breaks out, just unleash the drones (geofenced to the desired area). Instant crowd control.
Like I said, interesting and terrifying.