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Comment by callumprentice | Hacker News Reader

Sort of related: Drones as a service (DAAS) - let's you fly real drones via your browser. http://cape.com

Careful. The "Fly Now" button makes it sound like you're going to put your email in and get to fly. In reality, you're signing up for their mailing list for when they get to Beta....

Behavior like that is why I always give out https://www.mailinator.com/ addresses instead. Or one of the infinite number of alternatives that aren't blocked on site X.

That's true but for me, I signed up perhaps a month ago and was given access to fly just a few days later IIRC. It works really well and is a huge amount of fun.

[co-founder of Cape here]

We're already in beta! But since our system involves physical drones located in the real world, we have limited supply of available flights. We currently load balance the demand from our users by having a waitlist from which we whitelist folks on a weekly basis, and a queueing system when all of the drones in our fleet are simultaneously in the air.

It will be awesome if you mention this just before asking new users to login with google/facebook.

Stopped me from signing up. It's a bit deceptive to say "Fly Now" only to, well, not be able to. I also refuse to log in with Facebook or Google.

Looks cool though...

Fake "actions" on web sites, used to gauge interest, are disrespectful, and quite simply a jerk move. Just like those "sign up for our spam" pop-overs. There are enough things broken on the web without intentionally adding to them. Please don't be a jerk.

I agree, this is a dark pattern.

I wish I have read this comment earlier. Clicked 'Fly Now'. Logged in using my google account and got presented with two huge textboxes. I felt cheated there :D then closed after few seconds.

Very cool idea. That challenge to try to crash one of their drones seems pretty enticing...

Impressive. I wonder how hard it has been to code something to avoid drone crashes.

Was wondering the same, the FAQ says:

  > What if I crash the drone?
  
  You can't! Our engineers have built in extremely robust   safety features,
  such as mid-air collision avoidance and advanced geofencing,
  that makes it impossible for you to crash our drones.
  You’re welcome to try to crash them :)

Does Cape allow independent control of the individual rotors? If so, I wonder how well the safety system would handle a drone being flown to its maximum altitude and then having the rotors on one side run in one direction and the other half of the rotors run the other way. In my mind this would cause the drone to rotate around a vector in the horizontal plane while gravity would be pulling the drone downwards. Higher altitude would give more time to build up the angular velocity of this rotation. If then the angular velocity is high as the drone approaches the ground, the system might not have time to recover stable flight. Thus the drone might crash.

Yep good point! We currently do not allow our users to actuate individual rotors to this degree of control. Instead, we allow lateral translation to move forward & backward, strafe left & right, ascend & descend, yaw the drone, and pitch the gimbal. Basically, standard WASD + mouse game controls.

Most quadcopters don't allow for the motors to be reversed - it's very rare for the motor controllers to support this unless the quadcopter is specifically designed for inverted / "3D" flight with custom motor controller firmware and bidirectional / 3D props.

"What motor inputs would cause the hardest recovery situation" is a pretty fun question, though - I think the best you could do would be to throttle the two motors rotating in a given direction to zero (both CW or both CCW), which would induce instability in multiple axes at once. But there's probably something more creative I'm not thinking about!

The obvious next question: where do I buy such an uncrashable drone for my own personal use? Is there something like that readily available on the market, or is that the company's secret sauce?

So, how exactly does this work? If I'm flying a real drone, in a real location, then how does your system stop me directly flying into a wall/into some other hazard at high speed?

Is it like a really advanced self driving car with sensors that detect solid objects and automatically steers around them?

Because with that quote from the FAQ, part of me wants to see the result of flying the drone full speed at every solid object in the vicinity. Or see how far it can go before the battery dies...

I was just predicting we'll see this some day, and here it is already, amazing.

Woah, this is super cool! Very interested in how they deploy all these drones, keep them updated and maintained, and (if they are) up 24h/day.

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