We've taken it out above because it now redirects to a porn site.
That said, flying objects are inherently dangerous. I was at a bike race and a guy was following the pack with a DJI drone. One motor suddenly failed and the thing plummeted to the ground from 40ft and broke into a bunch of pieces. Luckily, it didn't hit anyone but it would have been a major incident if it had.
There's a lot of excitement about the cool, flashy features of these drones (following, waterproof, nice camera) but no assurance that it won't suddenly break and kill someone.
I want 99.9999% reliability and strong safety guarantees as a feature.
The more I think about it, the more I think, the risk of flying these things in populated places just isn't worth it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9rnTk6FBzs
hehe
The air drag from the balloon will be an issue. OTOH the motors could be run at low power when cruising and at high power when speedy maneuvers are required.
The size will definitely be bigger. But if we talk about professional-grade drones (for video reporting, etc), they are large and expensive as they are. Improved safety and thus easier time getting allowed in to a worthy event might be more important than a lean package.
Edit: which makes for a lonely hobby.
Unfortunately, currently we probably make do with a few less nines on all these items.
A drone that loses an engine falls out of the sky and lands on top of anything that is below it, and as of right now, there are no evasive maneuvers that can be executed. Especially for drones that are being used to record large public gatherings, things like multiple engines or parachutes should be absolutely mandatory, at least by the organizers of the event.
Needless to say, I'd bet it'll take one or two insurance claims until they are.
I even suppose that parachutes or stability with 1-2 engines lost might not be "mandatory". The cost of insurance of unequipped craft flying on a major event would be so high that nobody would even try that.
To my knowledge, no commonly sold cars are exclusively drive-by-wire for the braking system. If you lose all control in a car, you can turn off the ignition and forceful application of the brakes allows you to stop, even if you lose the power assistance.
By contrast, the most common failure mode for a drone in the air is... it falls out of the sky. That's pretty much the long and the short of it. There is good reason that flying objects should be held to a higher standard of safety.
Maybe drones need to start to incorporate parachutes to slow down the fall in case of problems like these, or maybe even airbags to ease the crash. Not that it would make it 99.9999% reliable, but it should be better than nothing. And also won't completely thrash your drone when it crashes.
edit seems nine_k already commented with a similar idea
The comment that mentioned parachutes was talking about how a drone crashed at an event and almost injured people. My personal homeowners liability policy covers things like hitting someone with a shopping cart in the grocery store and hurting them, it probably would also cover a drone, but if you don't have insurance it could expensive real quick.
And that seems like it's being pretty generous. In most "quadcopter crash" videos I've seen on YouTube the drone was much higher. Sometimes even hundreds of meters.
If there were as many drones (of that size & rotor size) overhead as there are vehicles on the road, I'd still expect to have zero to single-digit fatalities from drones every single year--at least from "falling out of the sky onto people's bodies."
Perhaps there are more likely cases where the drone is the indirect cause, like breaking someone's windshield and causing a fatal car accident.
Am I okay with my new born infant's soft little squishy skull living in a world with drones, which occasionally drop out of the sky?
Yep.
And we do live in that world, actually. They've already been "introduced," as you put it.
Already been introduced(bad term)? So 1 in 3 households have a drone in the U.S.? OK 1 in 4? You can always count on this statistic- 1 in 10? Nah? Surely 5% of Americans own or use the services of a drone then right? Yeah then they haven't been introduced yet
They're so small I doubt they'd have much of an impact on light aircraft either.
For the large bird test, the engine is allowed to shutdown.
[1] http://diaryofnumbers.blogspot.com/2010/11/death-by-coconut....
The cool thing about sidewalks is that they are elevated and it takes some effort to hop on to one and run over pedestrians (especially when there is a protective lane of parked cars). Drones, on the other hand, are poised to fall on people, with no barriers.
In my case it didn't occur when I was flying the quadcopter but rather when I was bench testing the ESCs (yes, I knew abstractly I should remove the props before doing this but I got lazy after a while of testing and eventually it bit me).
Having said all of this I mostly agree with the grandparent post (though I do recognize that a 2 lbs drone could, theoretically, kill someone) in that the solution to this as a safety issue is primarily just don't fly a quadcopter over anything you wouldn't feel comfortable crashing it into (basically don't fly over people or valuable property it could potentially damage). As long as you stick by this rule of not flying over anything you're not afraid to crash it into you already have a good (if not inexpensive) failsafe, which is just cut the throttle completely.
Too lazy to do the calculations :P
The energy we are talking about is not insignificant. I'm actually in favor of allowing people to fly drones with as little restriction as possible but let's not pretend there aren't some risks.
In any event, it takes a person 8s to get close to terminal velocity — that's a drop of 300m or so.
The energy involved is certainly non trivial but energy is not the whole story. The densest, heaviest pieces will be the battery and motors.
In order to make flying aerial drones safer, DJI, maker of popular quadcopters like the Phantom 2, is currently developing a parachute system called DropSafe, which can be deployed instantly in a case of emergeny
But the issue is the effective minimum height for a parachute to be any use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek0FrCaogcs&feature=youtu.be
It's an upgrade from "expensive rock with sharp blades falling out of the sky" to "expensive rock with sharp blades falling out of the sky spinning at X0 RPM, and the sharp blades are also spinning at X00 RPM"
If you are using alpha/beta FC firmware or your settings are still being tweaked you shouldn't anywhere near people anyway.
I've lost engines that resulted in nasty crashes. As I fly quads almost exclusively they are always nasty. As such, I never fly over or near people (other than myself).
I've read of full power loss, but never personally experienced it.
In any case I think I'd be more afraid of bad FC firmware that resulted in a fly-away event. Those are super dangerous as the machine just takes off into the air and away from you. That has the potential to be MUCH worse as the altitude they eventually fall from is significant. If you've never seen a full-power ascent of a multicopter then you're in for a surprise at the speed at which they can disappear while going straight up.
Mix that with a dual power system and 6 or 8 motors and I think you get MUCH better redundancy and fault tolerance.
And while you are at it perhaps a disconnected drogue chute that deploys if a watchdog signal is lost. Not something that is large, just enough to slow the decent to non-dangerous speeds.
To say nothing of things like active sonar/lidar avoidance and a secondary navigation system of some sort for when GPS is unavailable.
Optical flow can hold pretty stable when GPS is unavailable, other types of CV like SLAM even better.
Optical flow can hold position pretty well-- but will they be able to figure out how to navigate by it!?
I have a fairly cheap drone with a built-in camera and, no doubt, it could cause a scratch or bruise if it hit you at full speed, but luckily it's nothing like they used to be.
In most legislations I am aware of, RC flight requires an operator to be in control of the drone.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_goose [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549
Flock of drones is unrealistic too.
Why is the paraglider flying under the drone 50ft off the ground?
However I would think these drones' propellers are shorter thus less dangerous? Any ideas?
But yes, the huge blades [1] compared to the small and softer wings of a quadcopter make a big difference.
[1] http://i.ytimg.com/vi/bA3wp9h3abI/maxresdefault.jpg (same model that killed him)
For the most part, these little ones can probably hurt you as much as being hit with a rogue frisbee in the park. No decapitations. The bigger ones (Phantoms and the like) are more autonomous and better at avoiding crashes. Still, it's always a possibility and if you think you have any business flying one, you will know not to do so in a manner that makes it likely to hit anyone.
I think of it like riding a bike or a motorcycle. When you ride a bike you are supposed to stay on the road but a lot of people (especially kids with smaller bikes) will sometimes ride on the sidewalk or through the park anyway. This isn't usually a big deal because they won't do any major damage in the unlikely event of a crash.
But an adult on a large bike or a motorbike will get a ticket for riding on the sidewalk because you can do a lot more damage and you're probably moving a lot faster. As an adult on a big bicycle or motorcycle, you're obligated to only ride it in such a way that you don't put people at unnecessary risk.
I think of the little toy quads as the equivalent of kids' bikes and the Phantoms and larger video-centric copters like motorcycles. Sure, fly the toy in the house or in the park but if you're carrying cameras and gimbals and big battery packs and larger rotors, you really need to plan your shoots and locations to avoid the greater risk (IMO). It's a fair tradeoff for a fun hobby.
You can't do these sorts of things at all with human-sized helicopters - they're not maneuverable enough. In fact, the increase in maneuverability as high-powered single-rotor helicopters scale down is actually a problem for human reaction time. Model helicopters conventionally used a mechanical flybar in order to make the helicopter less responsive to inputs and more controllable. More recent innovations in flybarless electronics have enabled fly-by-wire control to substantially speed up responsiveness while still permitting stable flight when desired.
A single-rotor stunt helicopter is very different from a camera multirotor. A 1.6m carbon fiber blade vs a (usually plastic) 0.1-0.4m blade. A high-powered two-stroke engine vs a battery and motors.
And very importantly, the purpose of the two aircraft is entirely different. This type of helicopter uses collective and cyclic pitch oscillations, and a rudder. That's a completely different control scheme than a normal multirotor, which uses differential thrust. It lends itself to storing energy in the angular momentum of the blades at low collective pitches (running the rotor progressively faster while hovering), and then releasing it all in a maneuver by setting the pitch higher. That means the flat, strong carbon fiber rotor blades can be travelling at a tip speed of 400mph or higher. Even a very large camera-toting quadrotor is likely to have a (plastic, thin, bendy) rotor tip speed in the 100-150mph range - they're optimized for hovering battery life, and differential throttle has limited maneuverability, and the slower & larger the better. Being so much ligher per (disposable, easy to break) prop means that even at similar tip speeds the angular momentum is much diminished.
"Video footage has emerged of Mr Pirozek, who was a world-recognised aerobatic flyer, putting his Trex 700 helicopter through a series of remarkable tricks, including one that involves dropping the $1,500 model out of the sky by turning off the engines and restarting them just before the model chopper hits his head."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0wvXoZ9KYg
Lastly, "beheaded" seems to be a linkbait overstatement, and is considered dubiously by the medically inclined - even with all the power behind those blades, the skull is a very strong thing. The eyewitness comment was that there were wounds to his scalp, which tabloids turned into "cut off the top of his head" and then into "cut off his head". There were wounds to his scalp, but the ones to his throat are likely the ones that killed him. You don't need to sever the spinal column to slit a throat with a sharp blade.
>HOW DO THESE AIRSHIPS HANDLE IN WINDS?
>Hyperblimps, like traditional planes, can handle winds according to the speed of the ship. Our top speed as of July 10, 2010, is 40 mph, enabling a skilled operator to fly in winds of about 15 mph. We hope to be surpassing that speed soon. As for crosswinds, the ship is simply “crabbed,” just as a traditional plane is.
I just got nervous and called few people and cracked down the drone.
Then decided never play with them in domestic living area.
I've always tried to fly responsibly at all times. I am cognizant of weather, people/pets, surroundings and right-of-way in the sky. Nothing in life is guaranteed 99.9999% of the time. Is it OK for me to levy a 99.9999% guarantee on you, that you drive perfect and responsible (no radio, no food, no phone, no talking, no distractions - period)? No. That's not life in general - we don't live in a bubble. Well at least the general population doesn't.
I am fine with sane safety measures put forth... Certifications, registrations, etc. But this is a hobby like many others. People own many kinds of recreational hobby gear that can endanger the operator or surrounding people - yet, they're accepted because people think they understand them. Most don't, however, understand simple engine operation - yet drive cars.
All mechanical vehicles have the guarantee to fail at some point or another and, yes, someone is 100% guaranteed to get hurt at some point in time. But, please don't ruin my hobby because you choose not to understand it.
I'm not arguing for draconian policy measures. I just want manufacturers to focus on and market reliability and safety features. It's a win-win for users and manufacturers.
Manufacturers are clearly aiming for these drones to be everywhere and for everyone to own one. With many, many people flying for the first time everyday there are going to be accidents. If manufacturers can reduce the harm caused by these accidents then they'll have a much easier path for FAA regulations and public acceptance.
For users, they get the ease of mind that crashes won't be catastrophic for their drone and a reduced chance that they'll inadvertently hurt someone.
I'm not disillusioned though - it will happen, I'll lose an ESC mid-flight and I'll have to deal with trying to guide an uncontrollable aircraft that I may not have line of sight on. Pretty much next to impossible to guarantee anything in that situation.
I want proper insurance, liability, etc. when things fail, and good risk management.
I don't want stupid safety.
I see them selling in Target all over the place. When I was a kid you had to find a pretty specialized store.
In the US maybe, I can't.
> You can still (barely) buy model rockets.
In the US maybe, I can't.
> You can buy glass windows (which shatter into thousands of sharp pieces if broken).
In the US maybe. Safety glass is really not very dangerous, and it's standard.
I only mention the general cost because - there's not that much margin in these things to achieve what you want. Nobody will spend $2300 on a Phantom if that additional $1000 is for upgrades to safety and ignorance factors.
There are many things that didn't start out with any guarantees of implied safety - and many things that are assumed safe, when not operated safely, are inherently very risky / unsafe.
Finally, there are easily many tens of thousands of hobby grade drones out there - flying daily, operating (for the most part) safely (again partially dependent on operator). How many deaths have occurred to date?
Something that really bothers me is that when I first started flying the general reaction I had was of excitement - although I was generally no less cautious. The RC craft I flew drew interest and excitement from bystanders and it was generally a good experience. Now, I am overly cautious when flying anywhere near public areas. I've received comments about how I should "go somewhere else", even when I was flying in an area where there were no people, but someone decided to seek me out since they saw the craft from remote. And I've generally just tried to stay out of places I know would be potential hazards if there was a malfunction where I lost control.
Do I still fly in "tight" locations? Yes - I do. I've flown my neighborhood to assess storm damage for my neighbors knowing that there are people - but in those situations I always fly with prop guards and try to fly over houses, not over sidewalks or roads. And then there's the artistic side - I like taking shots of architecture and some of those situations require thoughtful planning or waiting for an area to clear.
I can't help other people's ignorance and I will say that you flying untethered with no experience is not something DJI or I should have to worry about - that's your choice and risk to weigh. If I was your neighbor I'd have a frank conversation with you about your actual skills and ability to ascertain risk.
In my opinion golf is far more risky than flying "drones" (I prefer RC quad-copter, but to each their own). I play golf, I love it. I'm not going to stop playing because you hit golf balls off your deck into your neighbors yard and then expect Titleist and Callaway to fix your bad decision.
Well, not that I agree with the need for what he says, but what you describe is easily solved:
People WOULD pay $2300 on a Phantom if the "upgrades to safety and ignorance factors" were compulsory and so every drone on the market had to bear that extra $1000 in its cost.
There are the two similar, but very different scenarios: 1) controller crashes RC aircraft into person because of negligent flying, or 2) loss of control due to hardware failure crashes RC aircraft into person
Both are real scenarios with cars and scenario 2 isn't accounted for during license testing. What people need to understand is that these devices shouldn't be outright banned because of impending accidents. Yes, those will be unfortunate - but the hobby has good recreational and business use cases in my opinion.
A drivers license is a bad example.
DO NOT FLY NEAR PEOPLE.
It's that simple. No functioning machine can ever be inherently safe, safety is the result of continuous exercise of good judgement. When operating a large nitro powered helicopter, featuring 700mm long carbon fibre knives that spin at 2000rpm, controlled by an imperfect operator, through an imperfect electronics system, powered by an unreliable motor I am aware that it is an intrinsically dangerous object, and I only fly it in controlled areas, without bystanders who could get hurt.
And it annoys me to no end when I see some idiot crashing his DJI into a building (no flying within 400m of a built-up area - don't fly near people), or a new guy with a t-rex or raptor helicopter flying near people in a park in the middle of town (Don't fly near people!) Or someone who should know better like a model aero club member flying over the pits or the viewing area or the carpark (don't fly near/over people!)
I actually want something like the machine described in the article, because I want to be able to film myself skiing, without the horribly cliched helmet cam, but unless I can get something small enough that it CANT hurt someone in a collision, or something with very robust collision avoidance, I can't use it. Ideally both, because even with perfect collision avoidance, something else could still break.
Life is inherently dangerous, and almost every technical innovation is first met with objections with how it will cause loss of life. The danger of accidental personal injury from drone is probably an order of magnitude lower than the danger of accidental personal injury from discarded banana peels.
> I want 99.9999% reliability and strong safety guarantees as a feature.
Then you want the technology not to exist, which I think is a terrible shame. It's like crying "fire hazard" around a Tesla. If you want a hobby device to rant against, try scooters, those things are much more deadly and rightly deserve to be taxed and regulated. [1]
The Lily drone if it actually performs anything like that video, is pure awesome, and absolutely the future. If it can be made quiet enough and compact enough it replaces everything from the cinematographer at your wedding, to the selfie.
It also probably looks good in black with a nice white pin-stripe, with the letters N-Y-P-D, floating around Times Square, and running no-knock warrants. 10 - 15 generations along actually, this thing is quite terrifying, for completely different reasons than 'OMG it will fall on me'.
[1] - http://www.nationaljournal.com/health-care/the-most-dangerou...
I take it you don't drive, or allow yourself to be driven, right?
99.9999%
Things are amazing, and nobody's happy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E
There are people starving to death on the one side of the planet while there are others who don't know what to do with their money on the other. I'm not saying everyone should be driving Ferrari's but in 2015 there shouldn't be people without shelter, food or basic medical safety lying around. If we as a society solve THIS problem then, everybody will much more happy than it is today.
But really, working in internet tech, there's no excuse not to get out more often. Internet connections are everywhere and portable computing is absolutely viable.
Lastly, the part in the video where the guy just tosses it into the river was definitely mind-blowing.
It doesn't have obstacle avoidance or it will make a massive deal of it.
Shame the dev kit only has Windows support.
(edit: because short-range and little ambient IR are required)
LIDAR works already but is heavy, power hungry and expensive. Not good for these small vehicles.
But in the general case you can't rely on this approach because sun.
That's a fair point. So RealSense will probably work at night, in a shady forest (like the demo) or maybe the shady side of a mountain, but as soon as the sun is involved IR becomes unusable. I don't suppose you could switch the other side of the visible spectrum and do UV cameras, could you? Having your data reduced to one dimension per pixel really makes the AI easier.
Seek A Avoid B
In your case, a ton of Bs in terms of leaves, branches and etc.
I guess it would need a wide scan to detect if there is a path either vertically or horizontally.
Right?
So once it Avoids (Steers away) B it can continue to Seek (Steers toward) A with the tracking device.
Obviously depends on how well the scanner to pickup obstacles work. You would need some sort of a heat map to detect leaves or branches.
(As a concept, this is amazing - excited to see how well it works in practice.)
Most areas have a club to keep members under control (irresponsible kiting can be dangerous to people not in the sea, unlike surfing) ... our club is keen on getting Woos, GoPros, webcams, internet enabled wind-o-meters etc... Hope they decide to get one of these!!
Edit: he accelerates from standstill at 9.5 m/s^2. I couldn't find data on what drones do.
I for one would prefer the aerial robot following me to not be traveling at 60MPH. That's asking for a serious injury.
Obviously gets quite dangerous in populated areas like ski slopes.
African American males could carry it. Then, when police was nearby it could launch itself. Maybe it would be triggered by the sound of sirens or if there is a website that tracks police cars, maybe it could launch every time they are near. Or maybe an apple watch could detect fear from differences in pulse and then launch it. Maybe some other trigger
A future, self launching, slightly smaller version of this could be a great protector of civil rights.
Women could carry it if they run at night and if they don't make it home it could fly to a police station.
Parents could send them out with their kids.
According to the creators v1 doesn't handle obstacles at all due to time and cost. I'm sure a later version can be made to do so; I feel like it should be far easier to do in a 3D space versus a flatted space like ground vehicles.
I'm a rower so fortunately I won't have the obstacles issue. In fact, these could be great for rowing coaches who can put the controller in the boat then get close up to the rower/crew without needing oversized launches that wash everyone else down.
20 mins might be a problem, but I don't see it as insurmountable.
It's still hard to part with my money (even at 50% off) when the ship date is next year though. I've been burned by various kickstarter projects that get delayed ad infinitum.
Me too. I've decided that there are no new things that I need so much that I can't wait until the thing is actually shipping. In many cases I've been quite happy waiting until a v2 release when the early bugs and quirks are worked out.
Even with huge savings for being "an early backer" - I've found I get more for my money (and sometimes anything for my money) if I wait until an improved "v2" ships a few months after initial release.
This isn't a slight on this project specifically but there is a risk that any project which isn't yet in production won't get that far...
TLDR; during development of the printer, a number of things have changed (including a noticeable reduction in print volume). Refunds were offered August of last year, and the vast majority of refund requests are still pending (and currently half a month behind their own deadline for the latest update.
Not that I have any knowledge on whether the people behind Lily have better or worse communication and management skills, but just because they're happy to offer refunds doesn't mean they'll offer them promptly.
Not after 90 days you can't.
My main concerned is the 20m battery life/record time - that is pretty limiting. If I were to use this to record myself snowboarding (like the video shows), that would be a problem. Here in Colorado a typical blue rated mountain run is easily 20m from top to bottom, esp. if you aren't gunning it the whole way. When I ride alone I can maybe go top to bottom in slightly under 20m but I'm flying and really pushing it the whole time, I wonder if the drone could even keep up in that situation (speed would be over 25mph almost the entire time).
Pretty cool but I personally think there is much bigger market for a device designed to record kids playing hockey, basketball, soccer etc... imagine a tripod that tracks your kid, that would be way way more killer and useful for most people and probably a ton cheaper as you could use a smartphone as the camera.
Technically it's impressive as hell, I just don't know about how practical is in actual use.
More info here: http://shop.soloshot.com/
http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/73083/how-doe...
EDIT: The included antenna is a wifi-like omnidirectional antenna, so I guess it's just using GPS. The precision is greatly improved due to large distances (linear precision is amplified into angular precision by O(distance) )
I'm sure they will also sell a Lily branded external battery that can be kept in your backpack and used to recharge it.
It doesn't seem like something they're interested in for the launch.
Very cool device and it would have a lot of practical uses, but not sure it will ever be that useful for the masses.
The airspace is going to be pretty hilarious at Killington on a weekends if half the people with GoPros upgrade to drones.
Where do you ski? 20 min at 25 mph implies an 8.3 mile long run.
Status Release Price
----------- --------- ------------
AirDog* Pre-Order Q3 2015 $1,295
HEXO+* Pre-Order Sept 2015 $1,299
IRIS+* Available Now $750
Mind4* Kickstarter Failed $900-$1,489
Lily Pre-Order Feb 2016 $519-$1,019
*Note that all but Lily require a $300 GoPro camera.
EDIT: Found Lily release date...
The price just seems unbelievably low compared to all the other options.
In any case, I don't believe that's the entire cost of the unit, I think that's just 'put x dollars down to be put on the preorder list' and you just might have to pay the full amount later.
Can it follow you around the corner of a building without clipping it?
Can it avoid bumping into a tree?
Will it climb above the trees to follow you through a wooded area?
Can it avoid getting tangled in an overhead utility line?
Purchaser agrees to stay clear of anything in the range of the UAV, or anything it could possibly collide with such as power lines, buildings, other UAVs etc.
I just tried to contribute with relevant information and got two sarcastic replies in return. Well done, folks.
Thank you very much for pointing the clause in the terms out.
I sent an e-mail to the contact us link with the same questions I listed above, and the developers replied with this information and the note that the user can hit the center button on the wearable tag to put the UAV into hover mode to prevent collision.
1) 20 minutes is great if your sole purpose is getting video, but not if your sole purpose is surfing (let's say). A surf session might be 2 hours. Taking a break to put your dead flying camera away in the middle of it isn't ideal.
Still there could be work around for this at some point.
2) Air space. The real problem. If you're surfing (again) or skiing you'll annoy everyone with the sound of your drone.
Still for the more adventurous who get to surf or ski alone, this does look pretty awesome, but will never be as ubiquitous as the GoPro.
But yes, 20 minutes is really short, it's its major default. I suppose it was a necessary sacrifice to make this kind of product at this time.
The chances of survival drop severely after 15 minutes of burial.
The only people that can save you in an Avalanche are the people in your group.
Source: Canadian ski patroller.
Additionally, if you've ever dug someone out in the field (or practiced doing so) it takes a lot of effort to move snow. Being within three meters isn't good enough.
No they can't.
Avalanche safety is one use case where, as with defibrillators or hospital pagers, I think people will continue for a long time to use simple, rugged, and purpose-built devices with very low probability of failure rather than introducing a million new failure modes by using e.g. a cell phone or flying drone.
That is, let's say I'm going on a walk in the dark and I don't want to use a flashlight or wear a headlamp - I've thought of a drone flying 8-10 feet up, a few feet ahead of me, shining a light to light my way.
Since the Lily people seem to be here answering HN comments, I wonder, how far off is your product from doing that ?
This is actually a fairly compelling reason to do things.
However, if you are walking with one or two other people, their light depends on the direction of your head. And also on your relatively close proximity to them.
I dunno. It has occurred to me several times.
I really want one but I've grown wary of pre-ordering products that haven't been manufactured yet...
Just in case it's not obvious: I'm not complaining or being sarcastic, this is honest praise.
I just text a friend to visit https://lily.camera and he'll never see it, because it doesn't exist.
It is entirely pointless to not redirect. There's no reason the URL posted shouldn't redirect to the www version.
So I was thinking of a drone to film us from the side or above, but our skipper thought that no drone could handle the 15-20 knots with 30knts gusts winds we were sailing in.
Here's a drone that can fly at 100 mph (87 knots):
Maybe due to the fact drones are primarily used for war at the moment...
I was thinking more about the future applications of high-speed small drones when they become ubiquitous. Even if it is simply reconnaissance.
Last time on Hintertux at 3500m we had also strong winds while snowboarding. I'd give it a test nonetheless!
Telling people the blades are harmless is very irresponsible.
I personally haven't seen this technology in DIY multirotor parts, but I know that the AR.Drone has what they call "cut-out detection". They use it to prevent damage to the craft rather than humans, but the technology could be tuned for this as well.
If a $60 device has it I bet the multi-hundred and thousand dollar devices will not have trouble.
I suppose the answer is that the owner needs to be responsible with its usage. The example footage seemed fairly reasonable use-cases (no bystanders).
In addition, 'cheap' blades have sharp edges due to the manufacturing process. Some drone owners recommend sanding them to get rid of those, to minimize injuries.
Anything else is not harmless. Even a tiny quadcopter can easily cut your skin, because the plastic is hard and sharp. Think of it as one of those plastic picnic knives, except not that sharp --- BUT rotating very, very fast.
I've been building and flying quads for years now and Anything over the tiny indoor ones commands a LOT of respect from me due to experience.
The idea of these things autonomously following you is cool but a HUGE liability.
Unless they have some major obstacle avoidance on board they you basically could never safely use this around other people and honestly you shouldn't even use it around yourself.
I continue to be horrified by what is happening with these multicopters. People fly them outside of controlled environments and with a total lack of consideration towards others or their property.
The vast majority of these things are cheap hobby-grade toys with laughable "safety" features. I own RC helicopters costing in excess of $3,000 and use a radio that costs well over $1,000. I still consider them dangerous toys not to be flown outside of club controlled environments.
What sucks is this morons are going to kill somebody and this will ruin the hobby for those of us who have been responsible flyers for decades.
In other words, even if you are flying total crap the probability of hurting anyone or causing property damage is greately reduced.
To anser the other part of your question. A $3K heli has significantly better electronics and mechanics when compared to something like a DJI quad. And, of course, there's the fact that it has excellent autorotation with full control on the way down.
Yet, again, the point is we don't fly over people, roads or buildings and we have far more experience flying than most drone buyers.
No software today can do what a reponsible human being flying at a club does. It's the equivalent of letting people take off and land full scale airplanes and helicopters from anywhere, fly at any altitude, in any manner they wish and without traffic control. In other words, unthinkable.
I do not fly over people or property. Software cannot make that decision for me. And software certainly cannot restrict people buying a $300 quadcopter from flying it above a group of kids at the park or over a crowd elsewhere. It is a simple matter of individual responsibility and consideration for the wellbeing of others. I choose to fly at a club because after 30 years of experience flying (and, yes, crashing) all kinds of model aircraft I know these things can fail anywhere, any time and for a million different reasons. It is beyond irresponsible to fly these things in uncontrolled airspace.
These campaigns are essentially people just asking you to buy them a drone:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1430324424/drone-scouti...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1802912897/drone-build-...
I wasn't aware campaigns of these sorts actually existed. Probably because I have always stuck to the front page of kickstarter.
I thought they are not allowing them completely, but apparently not. Yet in general, Kickstarter has higher quality content than other platforms.
- Real obstacle avoidance so it can work in urban areas so people could do news / tour guide broadcasts like some people are doing on Periscope these days. Rather than holding your phone up in front of you (which gives you a pretty shaky video), you could just tell it to follow you while you talk to it
- A sliding viewfinder that stays on your "face side" so you could see exactly what is being shot at all times.
- The ability to stream the video to another device (like your phone attached to an external HDD) would make it so you could shoot longer form stuff - maybe even complete solo movies, like some of those Assassin's Creed-esque parkour videos.
Especially in the extreme sports selfie video genre, hands-free operation would be a big advantage.
For example, Google & Siri kind of need to be able to handle anything I throw at them: "What is Ke$ha's new album?" "What year was the Hardy Boys book 'Hunting For Hidden Gold' written?" They may use a language model that favors grammatical language, that is: "What is Ke$ha" is a more likely speech recognition hypothesis than "What hiss kush ball", but they still need a big model to represent that.
For drone control, you have much more constrained language, which helps recognition accuracy significantly. The model can tell the recognizer that if it heard "Go <unsure> 100 feet" that the <unsure> word is most likely to be a direction like forward/back/left/right/up/down, and not "neutrino".
It's a lot like the way that Norvig uses n-grams to illustrate writing a spelling corrector: http://norvig.com/ngrams/ch14.pdf Having a model lets you fix errors in the input.
Having constrained language and a good model is often critical to creating a successful speech interface.
Really cool idea. Now I have a strange urge to break out the ArduCopter.
Can you do non-conductive power transmission at reasonable weights and efficiencies? I mean, my toothbrush does it, but I can't speak to the charging rate.
The main job here (which they have done well) is turning it into a mass consumer product, easy to use package. DJI has done a pretty good job for prosumers on it but this is another notch up.
Like the waterproofing!
Video suggests a higher level of autonomy than I think they have right now (obstacle avoidance, automatic landing on your hand) but a year might be enough to cram it in there.
I think we will see many more consumer drones like this.
I have seen multiple promo videos for various drones offering same "follow me" feature.
Here's one I found in few seconds https://store.3drobotics.com/products/iris
The 3d mapping on this one is amazing.
Just look at the design of the thing, it's clearly more for play than work.
I don't want to see the drones flying at the mountain when I ski, but the blocker is definitely not lack of parents with money willing to blow it on stupid toys for their kids.
I wouldn't preorder one at this stage (even if I had a spare $500 lying around), but this is one of the coolest gadgets I've seen in a while, and the marketing is top-notch.
Generally, merchants don't take AMEX because it's expensive to do so. The fee rates are usually higher (~3.5% vs ~2.5% and there is a monthly access fee as well.
I suspect some sports will allow limited use during practice and scrimmages for training purposes.
> Currently, Lily does not have any obstacle avoidance capabilities. We have found that most outdoor activities do not need obstacle avoidance because Lily can follow the user's path. But again, there are no guarantees that Lily will not hit anything while it is following you.
"no obstacle avoidance" o_O
Basically it's like having your own cameramen, so you can have spectacular camera angles without involving huge crews. This could be cool for TV shows, documentary and indie films.
So long as you stay within recreational use guidelines (e.g., don't upload videos to YouTube), you should be fine.
What happens when the battery is low or when I give it a tad too much spin?
"Whoops, did I just lob my $500 gadget into solid concrete?"
Well, I suppose it probably has safer take-off modes, too. Can't wait until they shrink it down to tennis ball size.
I don't know about battery life, though, and that might be a large disadvantage of those. Also, fitting a GPS unit into one might be tricky.
This is a basic overview, but if you are interested google keywords like "parralax" and "parralax animation"
What if there is another person snowboarding on that slope with Lily? And he/she slides close to you?
So either 1) they expect you to pay more later 2) they are selling the preorders at a loss (woo venture funding! do things that don't scale!) or 3) their markup will be huge (>100%) when they start making regular sales.
It is annoying that everyone started calling Quadcopter a "drone", which is a very generic term. Flippin non-tech marketing peeps. -_-
Also, with a top speed of 40 km/h this isn't able to keep up with anyone who's past the rookie stage skiing/snowboarding. So their marketing is very misleading, either by intention or because these guys don't know shit about skiing.
All the interesting stuff for filming on the slopes happens at relatively low speeds - park, moguls, jumps, butters, etc.
[1] http://www.al.no/en/html/aktiviteter/vinter/ski_snowboard_ca...
The pull rope I linked above is for kids with small/medium jumps, and that's 40 km/h.
80 km/h on a snowboard is fast.
Is it possible to control it manually using standard RC controller and RC modules (i.e. Frsky)?
Also, does it have built-in collision avoidance?
"Come on Lily... power up, POWER UP!"
If my generation was called the "me" generation, how would you describe this generation?