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.
Unless you have one of those:
you have no real way to escape the line. Would be great though, to be able to figure out what’s ahead.
This actually occurs to me quite often when going to work in the morning. Since more likely than not, I have with me a bag with the Blackout Mini H Quad at hand’s reach, I have been tempted several times to grab the quad and have a quick FPV flight to get an estimation of the extent of the traffic block.
It has been more kind of a funny thought, than a real operational idea, for good reasons. Flying a quad FPV over a busy road with cars is obviously not a great idea, whatever the regulations are in your country. And chances are, the regulations will not allow it anyway.
On top of that, such an operation with a simple mini quad without a sophisticated controller, say with a GPS that tells the quad where it is with respect to the car, and a solid mechanism of automatic “return to home”, is not without risks, with a good margin for pilot errors.
However apparently I was not alone in imagining such a scenario. Renault, the french firm, now presented a car with onboard “slave” quadcopter that would allow exactly the kind of fantasy we report above to come true. Here’s the Renault Kwid:
And here is it in action in a simulation videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckR6sK1bN4M
Further reading
- http://www.businessinsider.com/french-concept-car-comes-with-drone-2014-2
Stay tuned on the Personal Drones blog for the latest multirotor and quadcopter news!