An amazing little personal drone in the form of a micro helicopter has been in use for a while now, strictly for military applications.
Black Hornet PD-100 PRS nano UAV – The perfect personal drone for military applications
Category Archives: Multirotors Research
Kitchen Drones in action – Multirotors support in running a restaurant
ArchAerial, a young company that specializes in the use of multirotors for mapping purposes, with a focus on archeological research and excavation sites, has published an interesting video on the possible uses of quadcopters in a restaurant environment , in collaboration with Swift’s Attic, a nice restaurant apparently open to innovation and new technologies, located in Austin Texas.
In the video, the little custom made multicopters from ArchAerial are shown performing a variety of tasks such as serving at the table:
slicing vegetables:
Continue reading Kitchen Drones in action – Multirotors support in running a restaurant
New quadcopter can fly, roll and float – MUWA: Multi-Field Universal Wheel for Air-Land Vehicle with Quad Variable-Pitch Propellers
MUWA: Multi-Field Universal Wheel for Air-Land Vehicle with Quad Variable-Pitch Propellers. A complicated name for a new prototype quadcopter that can perform a number of functions usually not associated with multirotors, such as rolling and floating.
Here’s the rolling drone:
This is not for fun. It is a research project developed in a robotics lab in Tokyo University and has a number of very serious potential applications that are briefly shown in the video that we post below. Those include capturing 3D images of environments, for example closed spaces, maybe difficult to reach otherwise.
The device can of course perform also perform as a regular quadcopter. It flies nicely.
Here’s the video:
Source and further readings:
Markus Fischer: smartbird, a robot that flies like a bird
Markus Fischer and his team developed smartbird, a robot that flies like a seagull.
As for the dragonfly, the world of flying animals inspires engineers for the building of human made flying machines. Enjoy the video:
Raffaello D’Andrea at Zurich Minds – Feedback control and the coming of machine revolution
Prof. Raffaello D’andrea, about whom we already made another post on athletic flying machines, talks at Zurich Minds about “Feedback Control and the Coming Machine Revolution”.
Here’s the video:
Athletic flying machines
Amazing presentation by Raffaello D’Andrea, Professor of Dynamics Systems and Control at the Zurich ETH. Prof. D’andrea demonstrates the amazing skills that can be conferred to quadcopters by developing and applying the correct mathematical algorithms.
Here’s the video:
Raffaello D’andrea interviewed by Rolf Dobelli, talks about some of his ongoing projects:
Prof. Adrian Lauf on drones, multirotor technology and potential applications
Prof. Adrian Lauf from Louisville University, specialist in embedded systems, talks about drones and potential applications – Link
UAV and law enforcement
Found this video that features a long interview to Prof. Alan Frazier on the subject of drone usage in law enforcement, in which he also answers questions from the public.
Prof. Frazier has a very particular curriculum, as he is both a Professor at the North Dakota University, Department of Aviation and Deputy Sheriff in the Grand Forks County Sheriff’s Department (link). This puts him in a strong position to deeply understand the technical and legal background of quadcopters, multirotors and more in general UAV usage, and to apply this knowledge in the field, as a law enforcement officer. For these reasons it is of particular interest to hear his views on the subject of UAV and law enforcement. Here’s the video:
For some quick examples of how drones were used recently by Prof. Frazier in the field, see this article