I've spent the past year working on a similar concept using the same flight controller, but didn't think that its safe enough for everyday consumer use, not at

I've spent the past year working on a similar concept using the same flight controller, but didn't think that its safe enough for everyday consumer use, not at least for another couple of years until radar or optical obstacle avoidance is available in the consumer space. Everyone who operates MAVs knows that things are guaranteed to occasionally go wrong even in ideal conditions. If GPS or INS glitches, the drone becomes a high velocity flying circular saw - and make no mistake, those flimsy plastic propellers will casually cut you to the bone at decent speeds. I've had a number of aborted flights and close calls during development, the scariest one being a GPS glitch while testing full autonomy on a crowded beach. The most common issue is poor GPS accuracy which can cause autonomous flight to be erratic or completely uncontrolled. In these cases, the operator will notice that the drone isn't responding correctly and switch to manual control to recover. The worst possible issue is a GPS failure or occlusion: if the system loses GPS during autonomous flight, it has about 10 seconds of guessing its velocity based on other sensors before it becomes completely out of control. In these circumstances, again the operator will quickly take over to recover. GPS dropouts or poor accuracy are a regular occurrence in suburbs and guaranteed in built up cities at altitudes below the skyscrapers. The only time it's more or less reliable is over water and rural land. I think giving drones without a means for manual control to untrained consumers is almost negligent and a disservice to the industry. Speaking about the 3DR flight controller and software in particular, there are a number of known issues such as the dreaded uncontrolled flyaway which are guaranteed to happen to one of the users at some point. God forbid one of these flies into a kid and leaves them disabled; the FAA is just waiting for an excuse to crack down on hobby MAV use.