Drone Relative Positioning | Hacker News Reader

Drone Relative Positioning

matthew-bird.com

59 pointsmooreds17 comments

Will be very useful for “delivering supplies” to “lost hikers” in GPS-denied environment.

  It's dangerous to go alone! Take this.

Yes, it's definitely important that lost hikers get what they need. Sometimes they get lost so much they end up in the wrong country!

I'm all for sending enough supplies to return them safely to where they belong.

There’s a ycombinator startup doing this exact same thing for the DOD. Not much of a “moat” apparently.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/theseus

Interesting... star trackers have been around since the 50s and inertial navigation / SLAM is pretty plug and play these days. Looks like the unique thing they are going after is spoofing GPS so that a consumer drone can fly in a GPS denied environ. Neat, but a bit dubious as an investment.

The problem with star trackers is that it's getting harder and harder to see the stars

This is for killing people, right?

Just russian invaders

It is open-source so it can be used by both sides to kill each other, or to assassinate a well-protected political figure, or to inflict damage on a crowd.

so it uses computer vision to recognize objects like mountain, sea, land, buildings and figure out its relative position?

this is a pretty robust approach except when visibility allows it. wonder if lidar + CV would work better here rather than a pure CV approach

nonetheless its an interesting approach as in some jurisdictions you need a permit to operate a drone, something autonomous like this could work without involving bureaucracy

  >nonetheless its an interesting approach as in some jurisdictions you need a permit to operate a drone, something autonomous like this could work without involving bureaucracy

lmfao permits are for law-abiding meat-bags; my swarm follows me autonomously, officer.

> wonder if lidar + CV would work better here rather than a pure CV approach

Not according to Tesla

if it's indoor, an IR blaster would be good enough.

Lidar would reveal your drone existence and location to the, ummm, "park rangers" when you are “delivering supplies” to “lost hikers” in GPS-denied environment.

As if bureaucracy doesn't care because it's autonomous.

LIDAR probably doesn't work over forests

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