Is Life a Smoother Ride If You're a Chicken? | Hacker News Reader

Is Life a Smoother Ride If You're a Chicken?

npr.org

81 pointsColinWright35 comments

After seeing the bird defecating on their kitchen counter, I decided this would be the perfect thread to ShowHN my latest creation: a 3 axis gimbal stabilizer for those not lucky enough to have cooperative avians. It's electromechanical, not biological, so don't get your hopes up.

https://vimeo.com/81292853

The video shows a synchronous split screen of the very same flight, with an unstabilized GoPro on left half and a stabilized one on the right half.

(other than the aircraft and the camera, everything there is self developed: firmware, hardware, gimbal mechanics)

Some more videos here: https://vimeo.com/user22741569/videos

FYI the audio is distracting, consider blanking it out and replacing with silence.

The gymbal is pretty effective, do you use a 6DOF system to provide the feedback? I have a system that I had hacked together with a 3 axis accelerometer and never could get it critically damped to the point where you wouldn't see some oscillation in the view. I speculated that if you had a gyro as well you might be able to use the magnitude of the gyro signal to tune the feedback loop with the accelerometer such that you could keep it critically damped over a wider variety of changes in orientation.

There are other such systems as you describe using 6DOF (like Alexmos, used in many DIY projects and commercial handheld gimbals), but none get to this level of performance. In particular these systems develop a lot of horizon drift under lateral loads affecting the accelerometer. Our system can be configured to use up to 19DoF (that's 9DoF x 2 sensors, and a barometer), which is partially the reason for the performance you see here.

One software suggestion. Have an option to put in an orientation tracking factor so you can have the PID loops slowly track the aircraft if desired. In some cases you want a perfectly level flight, but in others you want to have the feeling of flying smoothly with banks and all. It would allow you to dampen out all the craziness of quad flight, but still see majestic turns and such.

Wow, I never realized how the obnoxiousness of camera shake and rolling shutter combined to make something even worse than simply adding them.

Oh yes, you're talking about the dreaded "GoPro Jello". At specific vibration frequencies, the entire image begins to move around. We're doing lots of signal processing to counteract that.

Any chance you might sell this? I can imagine lots of uses for this tech.

Yes, it's going on the market pretty soon. If someone wants to talk, roee ಠ phobotic.com

I don't think that ಠ is supposed to be there.

It's my middle finger to the spambots. I figured they already have workarounds against all the permutations of '- at -', but no way they've thought of that one.

it always made me wonder why computer literate people obfuscate their email in such a way that a single regex could pickup about 99% of them.

personally i don't obfuscate my email at all - good spam filtering is much more effective than trying to hide your email address.

The fact that most credit card entry fields don't accept spaces gives me hope that most spambots can't turn " at " into "@".

I am definitely using that from now on.

I just use gmail. It blocks spam without requiring people to solve a puzzle in order to contact me.

Up until recently - I would have agreed with you. I just find I'm getting spam much more regularly now on my Gmail account.

Of course, many people probably wouldn't have a workaround to that one either, alas.

Point made - I've put it through an accessibility enhancement.

Pah. Chickens are for the budget low-end steadicams. Real pros use owlcams: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBpF_Zj4OA

Funny, this owl video shows that when blindfolded, the owl's vestibulo-ocular abilities are undiminished. I was wondering about that when the chicken video guy was speculating about blindfolding to prevent the chicken from rapidly changing targets. I guess it would actually work. Seems kinda mean though.

It's great to see SmarterEveryDay http://www.youtube.com/user/destinws2 get some press. Be sure to check out the Deep Dive play lists.

There's a big flaw in the NPR writeup. The research is on head tracking, but the writeup leads with an example of head + eye tracking, which is a much more difficult-to-test but more important hypothesis.

Yeah, I thought that was a little odd too, but remember that birds can't move their eyes, so for them the two are equivalent.

This… this is almost certainly why chickens' heads track more "smoothly" than humans. We don't need our heads to track; our eyes can with much less effort.

Someone already made a song out of this topic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBpF_Zj4OA (this is the original scientific video this song was based on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6M-h5g3PwI).

I was about to link it.

I wonder how this would have helped 'Mike the Headless Chicken', a chicken that survived for years without a head, being fed with a pipette and raking it in at freak shows:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken

This is too funny. Thanks HN for bringing some much needed amusement to my morning :D

At first I thought the article was a lesson about taking risks in life. But this was an amusing surprise.

Just use a camera with OIS instead!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbd7TtKrDFc

How has no one mentioned this video yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLwML2PagbY

Mercedes discovered this property of chickens a while back, and made a great commercial out of it.

And slightly older, Fuji: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26bw-fF3QbY&feature=player_em...

The Mercedes one is way better, though.

I actually thought this was going to be an article about whether people with a smaller risk appetite have more stability, but nope, really is about chicken.

A useful application for readers of HN: Save money on a steadicam and just buy a GoPro + chicken instead.

Or just let YouTube stabilize the video for you.

Perhaps they have warehouses full of chickens who do the video stabilizing, just like their armies of pigeons for search? - http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html

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