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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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!!