Check out this very interesting video that features an experiment in which a car is driven by a pilot that views the car and street thanks to a video feed from a drone.
Driving a car “Third Person View”, from an aerial perspective thanks to a live video feed from a drone
It looks and feels very much like a video game.
The pilot is getting a live video feed from the drone thanks to FPV goggles
The story focuses on his project, carried out with his students, aimed at mapping marine habitats with a self constructed drone, made just for this purpose.
Have a look at this beautiful little bird called “Henri”:
“Weighing in at just under 5 pounds, “Henri” (named in honor of the king of Northern Haiti from the early nineteen century) has a tough, floatable KYDEX® frame equipped with a high-def GoPro camera, an GPS enabled-autopilot chip, and other navigation electronics tucked neatly inside an upside-down Tupperware container mounted on top that serves as a perfect waterproof housing.
Henri can be guided manually using remote control or via autonomous mode with a pre-programmed flight path.”
Check out the construction process of the Harvard Monolithic Bee (Mobee), it’s fascinating.
A step in building a Mobee
Unfortunately not really something you can build at home. Nor can you buy it at a local shop. Oh well…
Harward’s Mobee drone
“Such bee-sized flying robots have low material costs and could be made in large numbers, and their small size lets them maneuver in confined spaces, Fuller said. They could have a lot of applications in remote sensing and in search and rescue operations, and could also act as “robobees” in assisted agriculture, pollinating flowers and fighting pests, Fuller said.
The researchers are working in parallel on the many different technological advances required to make these fly-sized robots fully autonomous and wireless. For example, they are working on providing it with a lightweight onboard processor, and a small, high-energy power source so that it is no longer tethered by wires.
They are also working on making the vehicles faster to produce and more durable. At the moment, it takes several days to make each robotic fly, and each vehicle can only fly for a matter of minutes before it has to be discarded. “We’re talking five to ten years before some sort of commercialization,” Fuller said.” – Source
The Gofor company now provides a number of personal services based on drones, that range from taking selfies to personal security. You can check the nearest Gofor drone on a map on a mobile phone app, get an ETA estimate and “rent” the drone for a particular service.
A screenshot of the Gofor drone calling app
How this service will deal with current regulations in different areas such as flight permission and privacy issues, remains to be seen. All looks very easy in the promotional videos.
Picture this. You are trapped with your car in a long line of traffic and have no idea about how long the line is, if there is an accident ahead and how far.
The AT Black Knight Transformer, the world’s first roadable VTOL aircraft. It is designed to be a low-cost rapid response ambulance to evacuate wounded soldiers from the battlefield or transport cargo.
The Black Knight Transformer seems to come right out of a science fiction movie. Those scenarios of cities from the future filled with flying vehicles might be a step closer.
See the Black Knight in action in this video on youtube:
And the official press release:
EL SEGUNDO, California, 8 January 2014 – Advanced Tactics Inc., a small aerospace company, released details about its AT Transformer vehicle technology and announced that a full-scale technology demonstrator has completed its first driving tests.
The AT Black Knight Transformer, the world’s first roadable VTOL aircraft. It is designed to be a low-cost rapid response ambulance to evacuate wounded soldiers from the battlefield or transport cargo.
At 2×2 cm and just 2 grams, Lisa/S could well be the world’s smallest autopilot, except maybe the one from the Black Hornet (on which no details are currently available).
The Lisa/S autopilot
Lisa/S was created virtually from scratch by Bart Remes, project manager of the Micro Aerial Vehicle Lab at the Aerospace Engineering Faculty of the TuDelft, and it’s team.
The research group of the Institute for Dynamics Systems and Control, led by Raffaello D’Andrea at the ETH of Zurich, in collaboration with a team of architects led by Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler, presented an installation in which a swarm of quadcopters autonomously pick up sequentially 1500 foam bricks (500 gr each) and position them at the right place to build a 6-meter tall tower with a sophisticated shape.
A quest toward the perfect quadcopter or multirotor for aerial video and personal flying freedom and a permanent survey on the latest quadcopter news and multirotor news
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