Gadgetory

drones sure predator Reaper huge 100 million dollar unmanned aerial vehicles that take high altitude photos and rain down death from above right well yes but that is not the end of the drone story a new wave of smaller low cost and hopefully civilian friendly drones could soon be flying in the skies above at 3d robotics in berkeley california former wired editor-in-chief chris anderson is flying high with this new trend so cameras are everywhere they're in your pockets they're on our street corners except for the sky why are cameras and skype is too expensive too dangerous drones are an opportunity to take sensors which is what cameras are and put them in a place where they have a new perspective on our world and what we do with that data is up to us these kinds of drones started as DIY hobbyist projects Anderson made his first UAV out of a lego robot kit and toy plane with his kids a few years back we just did this around the kitchen table and then we put in a plane oh my gosh and this is now in the lego museum in Billund Denmark the world's first Lego unmanned aerial vehicle today Anderson's startup designs open-source drones for use in all sorts of fields like real estate search and rescue aerial photography and even literally in the fields with agriculture do you feel like there will become a tipping point where people might start noticing drones whizzing by their car windows or whatever it is where will I think in five years time if you ask you know my kids what mile they know what's wrong but yes sir our neighbor kids it what drones are they say oh those are those things that buzz over farm fields yeah they think we missed farm equipment because when you think about it you know the place where we don't have a problem with drones is away from people I confess to feeling a little bit terrified with the drones whizzing overhead but I have complete faith in my pilots and this one looks like it's quadcopter yep this one right here is a quadcopter meaning it has four rotors so right now that closer quadcopter is flying itself it's in a mode called loiter it's about I'd say you know 20 feet 30 feet off the ground right just kind of hovering there it's compensating for the wind so what's in there like a bit there's inside a gyroscope there's owner like yeah there's the the 3dr autopilot the RG pilot is inside there and that has an IMU so that includes a gyroscope accelerometer magnetometer GPS so all of those things 3d robotics l's compleat UAVs that range from 500 to 700 dollars plus individual components and the standalone autopilot module that runs about 200 bucks the goal is to simplify and also crowdsource autonomous flying robots and then see what happens you've got this touchscreen interface and it's really high level in the sense that if you want to plan a mission you know you click here point point point you get all these waypoints I'm gonna change this Wayne point to a land Waypoint and then we could if we wanted to now just click go and that plane would go fly over the hill ok would do that loop and would come back and we just landed our feet what's great about our software so it's open source as you know and because of that I think it fosters this community of people who want to come out and just build cool applications program based autonomous flying that anyone can implement and I mean anyone imagine drones delivering pizza oh nice you guys are like the Blue Angels of drone pilots you're killing it right now oh hey day I should totally stop taking pictures and focus on this important story the possibilities for virtual reality are dizzying literally the 3d robotics field ops team let me try out their test plane equipped with an oculus rift AR headset alright so this is my first person virtual reality perspective flying an airplane that's it put it on hop in the rift I so yeah we got sake let's rev yep controlling what so we have the oculus rift here which is a first-person view virtual reality headset and it displays video but it also does head tracking so that is actually controlling the camera over here on the front of the plane ok and with that you can fly this plane far far far out of the field of view over the hills and you can see where it's going through the perspective of the plan so when i turn my head or these goggles that cameras move in can try it on yeah ok oh my goodness alright noses so you can move your head to the right and to the left weird of course all of this cool technology is right now kind of bordering on illegal FAA guidelines state that drones can only fly up to 400 feet even though many can and do soar as high as a thousand feet add to that the privacy implications and concerns over domestic surveillance and you have a few red flags but with the new legislation like it or not we might be seeing these six hundred dollar drones flying in all kinds of unexpected places in the not so distant future you