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Personal Surveillance Drones are here.
- sitmack 16y agoThis is really cool, but not legal esp if flying for money. You cannot let anything get out of visual range and within regular air traffic.
- dotBen 16y agoLooking at their product, I wonder how hard and how much $$ it would cost to make your own home-build type version? I was trying to work out why there was something that looked like an LCD screen on the upper-side of the wing and then I realized that is just a regular point-and-shoot camera. An EyeFi card (perhaps with an antenna built into the wing) would make a relatively easy upgrade from their current setup which looks like you have to wait to retrieve the plane before you can view the images. As the website states local laws may not allow you to run a UAV domestically - anyone know what the laws would be here in US?
- Devilboy 16y agoIn the US you can fly AUVs like this one as long as you keep it in visual range at all times (and stay away from restricted airspace)
- cameldrv 16y agoNot necessarily true anymore. The FAA has said that using these for commercial purposes is a violation of the FARs.
- mableflapster 16y agoCan you provide a reference to this info? So you can't buy this for comercial purposes?
- Devilboy 16y agoYea you are correct, I forgot to include 'as a hobby'.
- chopsueyar 16y agoIs there an FAA distinction between fully and semi autonomous?
- DanI-S 16y agoMan, I love living in the future.
- andreyf 16y agoConnect it to an iPhone and you'll be able to sell it to a new breed of 7 year old techno-hipsters.
- JabavuAdams 16y agoThis? http://www.parrot.com/usa/ http://www.parrot.com/usa/
- acabal 16y agoThat looks incredibly cool, and must have been so much fun to work on. I could imagine someone making a homebrew version with maybe a few year's tinkering in a garage and with a compiler.
- compumike 16y agoList price: $10,600 (http://farmindustrynews.com/crop-protection/drone-plane-your-future-0 http://farmindustrynews.com/crop-protection/drone-plane-your...)
- thefool 16y agoWow, the camera quality is pretty astounding. MAV's are pretty sweet as well: http://www.draganfly.com/ http://www.draganfly.com/
- savrajsingh 16y agoWired Magazine's Chris Anderson makes these in his spare time, and you can too: http://www.diydrones.com http://www.diydrones.com
- ck2 16y ago$1000 Chinese clones of this in one year. I'd bet on it. Now I hope someone invents an emi pulse to take this thing out when the neighbor gets nosy.
- jamii 16y agoEMP? A $5 catapult would do the job nicely.
- noonespecial 16y agoOr a couple of kites! You keep what you catch?
- makmanalp 16y agoHow about these, for $300? http://www.parrot.com/usa/ http://www.parrot.com/usa/ Or if you're more adventurous, you can chop 4 30 dollar helicopters from amazon, add in an arduino and IMU with xbees, and come up with your homebrew solution, like my friend who I've been helping: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvZKr47qt-A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvZKr47qt-A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk_uS9clTDY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk_uS9clTDY (These are pre-arduino, pre-IMU. Now it's hung from the ceiling and is controlled through the computer with an xbox controller. It's on a PID control right now, but eventually it'll be swapped out with a kalman filter based system.)
- fab13n 16y agoAs long as an iPhone is used by Parrot as the controller, you're stuck with the AppStore's diktats; in this case, Apple won't let them record videos. Also, Parrot's drone is fun to play with. The idea with sensefly is that you don't control it in realtime: you give it an itinerary before launching it, it follows it and comes back on its own. That's not as good for a toy, but more efficient for a professional tool.
- pornel 16y agoARDrone has an API, so you may be able to write your own Apple-free controller: https://projects.ardrone.org/projects/show/ardrone-api https://projects.ardrone.org/projects/show/ardrone-api
- chopsueyar 16y agoThat's pretty cool.
- yellowbkpk 16y agoFor those thinking that a homebrew version of this may come in the future, you've got it backwards. This is a professional version of homebrew. Check out http://diydrones.com/ http://diydrones.com/ as a good starting point, but this design is quite popular for hobbyists and is relatively simple to build. Definitely less than $10k-worth of time and materials.
- Alex3917 16y agoI'm guessing it's less than three years until there is a YouTube video of some kid being tazed for flying one of these over the white house or area 51.
- noonespecial 16y agoAbout 6 months after that, progressives will start agitating for "common sense UAV control" while conservatives will demand their constitutional rights to arm theirs with hellfire missiles. Whatever happens, sanity will be the first thing to leave the building.
- ra 16y agoThere's a neat subculture of RC who do some amazing DIY work known as "FPV" or first person view. Basically they hand build RC aircraft to carry a payload of onboard electronics, and also ground stations with aircraft tracking antenna from which they pilot and record their flights. The legality of this varies from country to country, however as hackers of their discipline, some of these guys are particularly impressive: http://vimeo.com/riscyd/videos/sort:date http://vimeo.com/riscyd/videos/sort:date
- inm 16y agoThere's a bunch more here from trappy. http://vimeo.com/trappy http://vimeo.com/trappy
- amino 16y agohttp://mikrokopter.de/ucwiki/en/MK-Hexa http://mikrokopter.de/ucwiki/en/MK-Hexa This is awesome. it has a gps in it it will return and hover where it first powered up at your command. there is a video of it carrying a 2 litre bottle on a string. cost is about $1500 i think.
- gamble 16y agoDon't try operating this commercially in the US or Canada. Drones aren't exempt from FAA rules just because they resemble RC aircraft. (In fact, the rules are more stringent since drones are still new and have failure modes that traditional aircraft don't) Pretty much the only cases where the regs don't essentially ban UAVs are small-scale hobbyist projects and academic research. See: http://cryptome.org/faa021307.htm http://cryptome.org/faa021307.htm http://www.tc.gc.ca/eng/civilaviation/standards/general-recavi-uav-2265.htm http://www.tc.gc.ca/eng/civilaviation/standards/general-reca...
- kiba 16y agoI suspect that there will be a war on unlicensed UAV in the near future.
- mkramlich 16y agoyes and that will be the Last War. the one that Skynet wins. :)
- rdtsc 16y agoThere might also be a war on licensed onces as well. UAVs currently are used mostly in combat zones, but I think it won't be long before they are zooming above restricted govt. areas, large cities, are used to track and chase fugitives, and even by small town cops to patrol and issue traffic tickets remotely. As this happens there will be some who will take it as a challenge to destroy, capture, and most of all, to take over these drone. That does not entail injuring or harming an officer or a human so those who would never try to mess with a real helicopter or police cruiser might not have a problem messing with flying remote robots.
- chopsueyar 16y agoI've always envisioned a near-apocalyptic, autonomous flying drone, resembling a large flying mosquito, about the size of a large pit-bull, that randomly targets parked cars, and siphons several gallons of gas from their tanks, in order for it to 'survive'.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- lukestevens 16y agoJust because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't a tiny drone above you taking pictures.
- danio 16y agoI predict a rise in crossbow sales in the near future
- scrrr 16y agoAh nice. Could be useful when looking for something or somebody, f.ex. ppl lost in the woods or similar. How long does it fly on one charge?
- just_a_someone 16y ago~30 minutes; ~20 kilometers
- motters 16y agoA commercial application which comes to mind is in farming - monitoring crops and cattle. Also for a small lightweight device it might be an idea to make the wings out of a solar material which can charge the battery and extend the maximum flight time.
- chopsueyar 16y agoWhy would it have to fly, though?
- motters 16y agoMonitoring the state of crops or cattle could be done by ground vehicles, but far less efficiently.
- konad 16y agoTime to build an anti-drone SAM
- torpor 16y agoThats fine and everything, but please try to watch where you're flying .. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXW2X2zAXAY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXW2X2zAXAY ;)
- recampbell 16y agoNow, start a business that lets you rent these per minute. You get to set the way points and receive all the photos/video via your browser or smartphone. It may not be this exact device, but I predict such a service within 3 years.