A swarm of micro-quadcopters
hackaday.com
hackaday.com
Still, pretty damn impressive.
This assumes the existing radio links can handle the extra bandwidth. I don't see a WiFi card, so they may use radios with low-baud serial connections. Maybe the radios are good enough that doubling the radio communications is fine. Now, all the new hardware means extra draw (and potentially extra batteries) on each quadrotor. They might fly with this extra weight, but it won't be nearly as long.
Also, indoor flying means no GPS. In this case, using accelerometers means something is dead-reckoning the position of each quadrotor. There's no more space/power for processing juice, so the external system must do this. Now the external system must take this localized data from each quadrotor and place it in some global coordinate system (how does it do that?). It will use dead-reckoning to determine the position of each quadrotor. This means the system is accumulating errors over time, for each quadrotor. At least sailors could eventually correct their position with stars - there is no real global correction with these sensors. They could hypothetically do radio range estimation on the radio signals of the quadrotors, but who knows what kind of accuracy they will get.
Now I remember why I left robotics :-)
Correct. However, indoor positioning tech will likely come of age in the next 12-18 months driven by indoor mapping and navigation. Once that becomes commoditized, it'll make positioning a little aircraft like this in the x,y plane of a floorplan doable without dead-reckoning. From there, you could probably do some crude lidar to measure the distances above/below the craft to the ceiling/floor.
The data from individual sensors would be very noisy.
I run the 100 Hz flight control loop for my tricopter on an ATmega1280 clocked at 16 MHz. A _lot_ more could be done with something like the Beagleboard, including generating a 3D map of the surroundings if I mounted a Kinect on it.
I want to agree about the decentralized operation because there would be so many wireless signals that could interfere, but those guys seem to be controlling 20 quadrotors without problems. I know XBees can be configured to communicate on different channels, but decentralized operation will most likely require something beefier like wifi (and that, I don't know how to configure to work over so many different channels).
What do you think?
I gratly fear a widely used, easily weaponized, remote controlled airforce that local enforcement officers can easily obtain.
Conceptually, surveillance-only UAVs are not dissimilar from police helicopters, which have been used for decades without massive privacy issues. In fact, when evaluating the option between acquiring a larger UAV platform or additional manned helicopters with high-end electro-optical camera gear for the Football World Cup, the local police went went for the helicopters as they performed better in that specific role and there was no cost saving.
I don't see much chance of police departments weaponising UAVs any time soon either. Not only does it push up the cost significantly, but there are accuracy and liability issues that will take some time to sort out. At most I could see helicopter-based UAVs being used to drop tear-gas near crowds and even that's iffy.
You'd also have to presume that if technology has progressed that far then things like extremely accurate long-range cameras and the ability to record sound from some distance away by measuring the vibrations on glass will also be available to them.
To some extent this is already here; the local police here have recently begun using a mobile van with a mast-mounted optical ball and have made arrests using footage captured as far as 3km away. Similar technology has been used to watch over the Occupy Wall Street protestors in NYC and elsewhere.
Point is the ability of the state to conduct surveillance on its citizens, both close-up and from a distance, is only going to increase. Fretting about individual pieces of technology misses the big picture, which is that only changes to the law and proper oversight will prevent it from happening.
I've also seen a demonstration of an experimental locally-produced surveillance camera (in this case intended for maritime observation) that was able to display the name on a small boat 20-30km out to sea. Granted, the camera was mounted on the top of a mountain to get the required height, but nonetheless the technology was phenomenal.
The difference between all the different varieties of surveillance technologies is starting to blur quite a bit.
These tiny drones are hard to arm, but they might be used for surveillance. Here's a more thorough report on the use of drones in the US: http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/report-protecting...
Obviously their will need to be a collision penalty but one would think this kind of behavior would be easy to do.
build a dependable prototype that you could resell to business that have storage units, and someone with a warehouse that needs security, or a museum even.
I built a similar quad using PCB milled on a homemade drill press for the center plate (rather than buying it laser cut).
The "Aggressive Manoeuvres" videos remind me of something out of terminator.