Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Needs more lasers.

Want your own autonomous flying drone robot? There's a Kickstarter for you!



I dig the autonomous flying part of it: It "knows" how to fly, you just tell it where to fly and what to do when it gets there.

9 comments:

  1. Yeah, MORE moving targets... And you don't even have to say pull! :-P

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  2. If the government has them, it's only fair that the citizenry should have them.

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  3. "autonomous" -- they keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.

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  4. Dreams of world domination - or of cruising anything more than your backyard - will have to wait. The radio chip on that thing is limited to 400 feet and runs on 2.4 GHz. Your microwave will cause enough interference that I wouldn't want to fly something with it, even if it is "autonomous".

    And echoing Joanna, "autonomous" in their mindset means you don't have to control every aspect of flight. But that is not what it really means.

    I don't normally think it nice to bang on people's ideas, but they are asking the public to consider sending them money for development. If you see it as a cool little toy that can be used to run a tiny camera or something in your own yard, it could be fun. It just cannot be much more than that, so consider that as you consider the Kickstarter. You can buy something much the same already.

    @bedlamite: Take the processor they are using and add some crude recognition code on top of a cheap low-power optic sensor and you could certainly program it to hit someone in the face. Maybe even teach it to target a specific face if up close and personal. I wouldn't expect much in the way of accuracy, but it'd probably be able to chase big blobs around pretty easy.

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  5. "If you see it as a cool little toy that can be used to run a tiny camera or something in your own yard..."

    Right, and...?

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  6. Autonomous drones. It's as if these people have never seen a science fiction film in their lives! WTF are they thinking?

    Although...

    >goto ex-wife
    >call Dalek subroutine

    Not that I bear her any ill will, it's just that she may be unwrapping one of these right now herself. So it's basically self defense.

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  7. As a person who has worked with microwaves, I see great sport in making a magnetron that knocks these out of the sky. At least outside my house.

    I think an attic or roof mount might work, and not bother the crows that like my ridgeline too much.

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