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Comment by spiritplumber | Hacker News Reader

Good for them? I did this in 2010 using a G1 phone as a controller.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi4jZKqZ8v8

Delivery was of a salami sandwich (we later cleared it out with the police).

I even gave Ryan Hickman at Google the software and hardware specs, when he was trying to fix up the Cellbots project in 2011. We were at maker faire 2011, which was funny because their android 'bot didn't work and ours did... Never heard much since, though.

Sorry for bragging, but it's a pet peeve I got. Anyway, the source and schematics are at http://obex.parallax.com/object/116 the Android side software can be had if you email me at mkb@robots-everywhere.com

We still use this to do autonomous deliveries! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urs68vf7ZFY

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> Good for them? I did this in 2010 using a G1 phone as a controller.

By an extremely liberal interpretation of "this", perhaps.

What's your pet peeve? That you did something vaguely similar a few years ago? Someone did it before you, too.

Chronic29, who is hellbanned, replied "The pet peeve is that Google does not deserve this attention."

I'd like to know who else has built and successfully trialled tail-sitting autonomous flying vehicles. This stuff is awesome!

I was in Italy at the time - no flying stuff allowed in town. So I built a small autonomous truck instead.

Also, thanks for downvoting a post with link to source and schematics, whoever you are.

Just speculating here—I didn't downvote—but I suspect it's because you're being an egomaniacal ass.

Sounds fair to me :) In that case if you must downvote, downvote a post of mine that doesn't have useful/relevant content.

I know I'm burning a lot of points on this one, but the fact is, I wasn't any more of an egomaniacal ass than the guy I talked to who tried to frankly pretend my work didn't exist.

And, this site working how it does, most of the value is in the comments -- why downvote something with (maybe tangentially) related links to open source software/diagrams that other people can use? This is HACKER news, correct?

(Now watch me get downvoted to oblivion just because I am standing up for what I think and backing it up as rationally as I can manage)

Next time you could try dropping the disparaging tone ("Good for them?") and just stick to the facts "I did something like this a few years ago..."

I see how that could be seen as disparaging, in English.

First demo of autonomous hover of a fixed wing UAV was by Paul Oh et al of Drexel in 2006.

http://dasl.mem.drexel.edu/alumni/bGreen/www.pages.drexel.ed...

https://www.microstrain.com/sites/default/files/Autonomous%2...

Fascinating stuff! I wish the video links still worked. :-/

Are you sure that was the first? When I was at Georgia Tech we were doing that in 2005 :-) there's some videos online

http://uav.ae.gatech.edu/wiki/uavrf/movies

Look for GTEdge transition to or from hover in the video descriptions. (We probably weren't the first either...)

Fair enough! Oh's paper claims priority :)

Could be publication delay or a mistake. Same era, so the time had come for that work.

> By an extremely liberal interpretation of "this", perhaps.

Well, the "this" operator is overloaded, just like in C++.

Hey that's neat. I worked on something similar back in 2009/2010.

<http://bardagjy.com/?p=614>

We used a G1 dev phone to fly a 1.5 meter wingspan airplane. We used only sensors in the phone, camera, gps, etc.

Honestly it didn't work too well - we needed either a much better model of our airframe, an airspeed (not groundspeed) sensor or an airframe that could power through 10-15 mph winds.

In the end however, we demoed waypoint navigation and imaging the waypoint. You text it lat/long and it texts back a picture.

We did it as a proof of concept (for an interested govt agency), modern smartphones are neat, but bespoke, real-time hw, with navigation grade sensors are probably an order of magnitude more effective (though an order of magnitude more expensive).

Working with android to do robotics was.. interesting. We had to do all sorts of hacking to make the phone behave a little as possible like a phone and more like a real-time controller. What do you do when someone calls the phone while you're flying an airplane? How do you keep the phone application from taking over and exiting out of your navigation app? While the airplane is 1000 ft in the air?

Yeah, I did a bit of air stuff with the same setup but nothing terribly interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7HooQZPSZo

What I ended up using for the ground/water stuff was sending serial commands out of the headphone jack... surprisingly low latency, especially compared to bluetooth, and it was only a few bytes at a time so low baudrate was fine.

http://robots-everywhere.com/re_wiki/index.php?n=Main.AudioS... Here's the source and schems if anyone wants them -- the idea here was to make the hardware as light as possible!

This McDonald's ad from the 90's was pretty cool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68jiSejx3wA

What's your pet peeve?

Do you want Google acknowledge that you did it first?

That this drone project may not have been possible without your earlier efforts?

Was that 100% autonomous or was there some extra input besides endpoints?

Does it use maps&gps/vision (yes)/lidar? (I assume the green images are taken from the imaging sensor on the controller).

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