Startups and Investors Bet on the Drone Economy @ Entrepreneur.com.

Entrepreneurs and investors are betting on a future full of flying robots that can be programmed to do anything from survey crops or wildlife to delivering vaccines to remote villages in Africa.
It may sound a little like something out of an episode of The Jetsons, but the reality is the Federal Aviation Administration is required to implement regulations to integrate commercial drones into the national airspace by 2015, meaning flying robots are going to become a lot more common in the U.S.

But entrepreneurs aren’t waiting for the FAA deadline before building their startups. The moment is too ripe with opportunity to not jump in the commercial drone business now, those in the burgeoning space say.

“It’s just one of those moments,” said Chris Anderson, co-founder and chief executive of 3D Robotics, which makes unmanned automated vehicles (UAVS). “It’s the economy at scale. Those technologies that used to be incredibly expensive are now very cheap and getting better and faster than any other technology in history.”

For their senior capstone project, Northeastern electrical engineering students Cameron Olean, Ben Leathe, Tim Hickson, Chase Hathaway, Dan Petrillo, and Andrew Barada, developed TRAQ—an autonomous quadcopter that uses a unique four-element antenna array to locate and navigate to the source of a radio signal. The quadcopter’s potential applications include disaster relief, surveillance, search-and-rescue, and stolen goods recovery. The quadcopter’s autonomous nature also enables multiple crafts to coordinate their movements and provide greater location accuracy. The team developed TRAQ under the guidance of faculty adviser Bahram Shafai.

Here’s a video from a UK viral ad campaign shared with us by one of the Adafruit community members, Gary Mortimer.

The vid is fun, quite a technical feat, and also interesting considering how sincerely it behaves as an advertisement compared to projects like the Tacocopter and sillier, DIY-centric Burrito Bomber that inspired it. Great gear, but does this project have the “toppings” necessary to reach — and make a lasting impression — upon a viral audience?

Here’s a perspective on this entry in the drone-delivery trend from Suasnews.com:

Tacos, burrito bombers, beer and now pizza. A me too viral ad campaign from the UK arm of Domino’s pizza. Shoreditch ad agency T+Biscuits didn’t think too far out of the pizza box when creating this one.

“At Dominos we’re always looking to innovate and find new ways to deliver our pizza and a DomiCopter could fit the bill perfectly,” said Simon Wallis, sales and marketing director at Domino’s. “We are the number one pizza delivery company and we are committed to staying in that position.

“What better way to totally avoid the traffic than to fly – if anything this will now make us even quicker! We think it’s a great way to reinforce that Domino’s go to more lengths than anyone to deliver great pizza.”

Read More.

Drone Light Painting Giant Sequoias by nate bolt.

In Yosemite with a DJI Phantom and a flashlight. I’ve got a lot of work to do on my flying skills or getting pre-programed flight paths working, but it’s fun to experiment with this. Lottta potential options with light painting on a massive scale. Next up I’d like to do some more water or some sky-scrapers with glass exteriors.

In a jaw-dropping feat of engineering, electronics turn a person’s thoughts into commands for a robot. Using a brain-computer interface technology pioneered by University of Minnesota biomedical engineering professor Bin He, several young people have learned to use their thoughts to steer a flying robot around a gym, making it turn, rise, dip, and even sail through a ring.

The technology may someday allow people robbed of speech and mobility by neurodegenerative diseases to regain function by controlling artificial limbs, wheelchairs, or other devices. And it’s completely noninvasive: Brain waves (EEG) are picked up by the electrodes of an EEG cap on the scalp, not a chip implanted in the brain.

Chris Anderson – From a Writer to CEO of 3DRobotics – Hack Things – We help software people make hardware.

You might recognize Chris Anderson as a world renowned journalist. Former editor-in-chief atWired, author of The Long Tail, and recent author of Makers, he has traded in his pen to become CEO of 3D Robotics, a manufacturer of unnmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).

So when I saw he was speaking at the annual Hardware Innovation Workshop, I was intrigued. Just how does someone go from being an editor to CEO of a robotics company? I knew he was an awesome writer, but seriously, a CEO?

Chris’s story starts five years before he quit his job at Wired. Passionate about hardware, Chris was spending his weekends building products with his kids, hoping they would gain his same affinity for science and technology. Like any Dad he wanted to impress his kids, but unfortunately most of his projects ended with them saying, “Is that all it can do?”

Wanting to step up his game, Chris decided it was time to build a robot that could fly!

Peter H. Diamandis on Google+ – 5 Steps to Cutting Costs Through Open Source: DIY Drones.

In this blog, I’m continuing my exploration of what Chris Anderson’s company DIY Drones has done in using open-source methods to create products that are exponentially less expensive to make.

Drone Light Painting at Märchenbrunnen.

This is a DJI Phantom Drone named Lucy II flying around the “Fountain of Fairy Tales” in lovely Volkspark Friedrichshain in Berlin at 4am.

Flying robot perching on walls with gecko adhesive.

In the latest work presented at ICRA 2013 in a paper titled “A Perching Mechanism for Flying Robots Using a Fibre-Based Adhesive”, the AirBurr V11 is shown attaching on walls using a deployable perching mechanism with gecko adhesives. Robots, similar to the AirBurr, capable of exploring cluttered indoor environments have many applications in search and rescue missions: they overcome ground obstacles easily and provide a high point of view. The new perching mechanism allows a flying robot to extend its mission time by turning off its motors while it scans the surroundings.

The video shows the perching mechanism that allows indoor flying robots to attach to vertical surfaces. The gecko adhesive pad is optimized for maximum attachment force and is mounted on a mechanism that stays within the structure of the robot during flight and that can be deployed for perching. The perching maneuver is very simple; the robot starts on the ground, takes off in the middle of the room, and when a perching maneuver is initiated by the pilot, the adhesive pad is deployed and the robot flies directly towards a wall. Once the robot is attached to the wall, the motors are shut down to save energy.

Perching on several surface orientations using a micro-quadrotor at UMD’s Autonomous Vehicle Lab (Dr. Sean Humbert) with directional adhesives and attachment mechanism from Stanford’s Biomimetics and Dextrous Manipulation Lab (Dr. Mark Cutkosky). The mechanism converts the kinetic energy of the quadrotor into opposed forces to load the gecko-like adhesives. The surface is a sheet of acrylic. This project was completed by Stanford’s Morgan Pope and UMD’s Andrew Kehlenbeck partly under ARL MAST.

Coming this month.
All the power, more security, less weight.

Wow, even the shadow on this thing looks awesome.

Drone Dudes are a team of filmmakers and designers who use RC copters to capture stunning aerial cinematography. In this video we interview Andrew Petersen and Jeff Blank, who operate a radial octocopter capable of lifting cameras up to 12lbs. on a 2- or 3-axis gimbal. All the gear stows away inside their Transit Connect, which doubles as a camping vehicle when they are on the road.

The guys at Mad Lab Industries are at it again, now with a Pro Level Hex-copter custom built platform. This time they didn’t add legs or anything like that this time… They decided to make Taco-slinging Copter. After a few quick ideas and a Lexan graciously donated by a nearby booth, Mad Lab Industries team quickly modified the Camera system on their Grasshopper Hexacopter with a delivery tray. Then we started dropping tacos on unsuspecting attendees at RoboGames 2013!

Luckily, Grant Imahara managed to take a break from judging the event so he could try an airborne taco. He was not disappointed.

Fresno Wedding Photographer http://www.chrisgeigerphoto.com. Jason proposes to his girlfriend Christina at Alamo Square park in San Francisco on April 7th 2013. Jason told Christina that he wanted to take some photos of her in the park. During the photo session the engagement ring flies in on top of a small RC helicopter and he proposes to her on the spot. Jason was shooting with a 5D mark II. Two aerial cameras were used on the helicopter, a Gopro Hero 3 black and an 808 keychain camera. Additional ground footage shot with my 5D mark III.

3D Robotics is the leading open source unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology company. It was founded in 2009 by Chris Anderson(founder of DIY Drones) and Jordi Munoz, and today is a professional, venture-backed enterprise with more than 70 employees across three offices in San Diego (engineering), Berkeley (business and sales) and Tijuana (manufacturing).

3D Robotics designs and manufactures electronics and aerial vehicles, including multicopters and airplanes. It created the APM autopilot line, along with the ArduCopter and ArduPlane UAVs. It is the commercial sponsor of the DIY Drones community and the exclusive manufacturing partner of the Pixhawk UAV research team at the renowned Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH).

WWF plans to use drones to protect wildlife @ The Guardian.

Conservation group WWF has announced plans to deploy surveillance drones to aid its efforts to protect species in the wild, as the South African government revealed that 82 rhinos had been poached there since the new year.

The green group says that by the end of the year, it will have deployed “eyes in the sky” in one country in Africa or Asia, with a second country following in 2014 as part of a $5m hi-tech push to combat the illegalwildlife trade.

Drone Makers Get Help From the Open-Source, DIY Crowd – Businessweek.

more people, including startups, an opening in the $1.6 billion market for drone design, which will almost double in a decade, according to the aerospace and defense consulting firm Teal Group. Online support is “quite a game-changer,” says Jeff Moe, chief executive officer of open-source 3D printer company Aleph Objects. “You have collaborative worldwide development of hardware and electronics.”

The teamwork extends from pilotless aerial vehicles that spray crops or map coral reefs to those that detect radiation. DIY Drones, an online community founded by former Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson, has more than 35,000 members and provides free access to thousands of schematics. Its pages receive more than 2 million views per month, says Anderson, whose own company, 3D Robotics, is making use of the crowd-sourced R&D. “We’ve been able to bring this huge amount of energy, ideas, and talent to bear for free that otherwise would have taken millions of dollars,” he says, citing his drone autopilot software, radios, video components, and camera controls among the designs he developed with help from DIY.

The Summer of Drones.

The Summer of Drones is an epic series of up to 34 Nodecopter community events to take place in North America and Europe from June to September 2013.
Our goal is to highlight the non-military potential of UAVs, bring together people from different programming communities, and learn some interesting new stuff while having fun with flying robots.

Domestic Drones on Patrol @ NYTimes.com.

The sky’s going to be dark with these things,” said Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired, who started the hobbyist Web site DIY Drones and now runs a company, 3D Robotics, that sells unmanned aerial vehicles and equipment. He says it is selling about as many drones every calendar quarter — about 7,500 — as the United States military flies in total.

Read more.

While I have seen land-bound brick laying robots before and thought those were pretty neat, the idea of brick-depositing drones both surprises me and connects the dots for me. Check out this fascinating Smithsonian Magazine article addressing this concept:

Drones can’t just destroy, they can create. Although the military uses of drones are widely debated, less discussed are their potentially revolutionary civilian implications. They aren’t yet widespread, but drones are being used by hobbyists, photographers, farmers, ranchers, and they may even herald an entirely new type of architecture. Last year, Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler, in collaboration with Raffaello D’Andrea, developed “Flight Assembled Architecture” – an experimental concept structure that employed small, unmanned aerial vehicles programmed to build.

Created as an installation for the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France in early 2012, the project models a speculative construction system that integrates robotics, digital fabrication, engineering, and design. Several small robotic “quadrocopters” lift 1,500 foam blocks into a complex cylindrical tower standing more than six meters high. While these miniature construction drones act, in part, according to a set of pre-programmed parameters, they also operate semi-autonomously; they’re capable of communicate with one another and independently sensing the height of the the tower to place their block accordingly. The tower is a model for a speculative future habitat that would stand more than 600 meters tall and house 30,000 inhabitants.

It makes sense to illustrate such a revolutionary concept with a skyscraper – after all, the skyscraper wouldn’t be possible if architects and engineers hadn’t embraced technologies such as steel construction and elevators. Construction drones are the bleeding edge of speculative building technology and they’re perfectly designed to create high-rise buildings in urban areas where construction can be incredibly difficult and costly. As Kohler noted in an essay for the architectural journal Log, “the conditions of aerial robotic construction are entirely liberated from the bottom-up accessibility of material, man, or [existing] machine.” These robots can create buildings without erecting scaffolding or using cranes. Drone-built designs aren’t beholden to current construction limitations and their use opens up a new possibility of architectural forms….

Read more.

A semi-autonomous blimp with 2 55″ balloons.

Chris Anderson: We Shouldn’t Fear Personal Drones – TIME Magazine.

Drones, like most robots, are designed for jobs that are “dull, dirty or dangerous.” We know what that means in a military context — everything from endless “loitering” over combat zones to remote-controlled warfare with the pilots safely in a trailer in Nevada — but soon civilian drones will be flying commonly overhead here at home. What will they be doing?

Read more.

The HyTAQ robot has been developed in the Robotics Lab at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), part of the Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering Department. It is a novel mobile robot capable of both aerial and terrestrial locomotion. Flight is achieved through a quadrotor configuration; four actuators provide the required thrust. Adding a rolling cage to the quadrotor makes terrestrial locomotion possible using the same actuator set and control system. Thus, neither the mass nor the system complexity is increased by inclusion of separate actuators for terrestrial and aerial locomotion.

The private drone industry is like Apple in 1984 @ Quartz.

“We’re past the Apple II, and we’re kind of closing in on the Mac,” Anderson says. The reference is to the early days of PC development—the Apple II was one of the first mass-produced personal computers in 1977, while the Mac became the company’s long-running gold standard PC when it was introduced seven years later. The Apple I, like Anderson’s early drones, was a garage product.

As the technology becomes easier to use and more effective, more people will see how useful they are and want them in their professional capacities, just as with other nascent tech products like smartphones and tablets. Cultural adoption can be just as important as business adoption, and the company that has the largest consumer marketshare will also have the most manufacturing experience and developed product.

That’s how we’ll get from the Phantom to aerial food delivery—or at least useful drones.

Read more.

This week on Community Corner, we stumbled on a great “dining room thrust test” shared by Ben Harber. He used a custom rig to test the thrust potential for a series of 3D printed propellers he had produced. We enjoyed watching him engage in science — and share his updates as he analyzed his data. We wish him well with his project!

If you enjoy his 3D Printed Propeller Testing: Shapeways + JavaProp, don’t forget to subscribe to his video channel!

Watch our video on YouTube. (And please subscribe to ours as well!)

Each Wednesday on Community Corner, we share something we have enjoyed the previous week on the Adafruit Google+ Community site “Makers, hackers, artists & engineers: Learning and sharing with Adafruit!” (Note: Google+ login required.)

If you haven’t joined us at this public community yet, stop on by for a visit. And bring something to share!

Aerial Mapping Easter Island @ 15 cm GSD @ DIY Drones.

Back in May we processed an interesting data set from Easter Island, Chile at 30 cm / px GSD. Kim Anh Hoang from the Easter Island Statue Project used the 30 cm Orthomosaic and DEM to produce a 3D Flyby of Rano Raraku and an EISP excavation site. We’ve now re-processed the data at the highest resolution possible, 15 cm / px GSD. The original imagery was obtained using an autonomous UAV flying at an elevation (AGL) of ~330 meters with a consumer level Ricoh GR Digital III camera. The GR Digital III is not GPS enabled, so geo-tagging was accomplished locally using the UAV flight controller logs. In total, 140 NADIR images were shot at 10 mega pixel covering an area of 3.7 km^2.

Friendly Skies: Drones to the Rescue @ WSJ.com.

‘Didn’t you always want a bird on a leash?” asked the young man. He was wearing a dinosaur hoodie, with soft fabric spikes down the back, and holding a piece of tape about 10 feet long. At the end was an airborne personal drone—four hoops fused together, propellers inside each—buzzing obediently behind him. The crowd of a hundred, at this month’s DroneGames in San Francisco, was rapt. A drone as a pet! We all wanted one.

The competition, a sneak peek into what’s coming in the new year, included 12 teams, with 43 programmers from Twitter, Stanford and beyond. The winner wrote a virus that installed itself in a drone and made it go crazy. He called it “amuckcopter.” But don’t let that throw you. Drones are more peaceable than you think—or they can be.

The Dawning of Domestic Drones @ NYTimes.com.

The drones are coming to a neighborhood near you.

The unmanned aircraft that most people associate with hunting terrorists and striking targets in Pakistan are on the brink of evolving into a big domestic industry. It is not a question of whether drones will appear in the skies above the United States but how soon.

Congress has ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to quickly select six domestic sites to test the safety of drones, which can vary in size from remote-controlled planes as big as jetliners to camera-toting hoverers called Nano Hummingbirds that weigh 19 grams.

The Drones Are Coming @ Business Insider. Get Ready For The Rise Of Personal Drones

Drones can be used for more than just war.

Already, companies like FedEx are counting the days until drones are admitted to standard US airspace. The FAA will officially allow it starting in 2015, but the drones cannot fly higher than 400 feet above the ground and must be at least five miles away from any airport. 

FedEx wants to be able to use drones to transport packages, rather than having to rely on passenger planes. That’s because passenger planes need to be pressurized, which is expensive, and they also can’t fly in formation, which is much more efficient.

Meanwhile, there’s a growing community of amateurs who build and fly their own drones. The drones typically have two-foot long wings and weigh about two pounds.
Chris Anderson, former editor in chief at Wired, and co-founder of 3D Robotics and founder of DIY DRONES, is helping lead the charge. 

Read more..

Report from the DroneGames – formerly Drone Olympics . Chris writes -

We had a a great time at the Drone Games at the Groupon offices in SF today. (They used to be called the Drone Olympics until they got a cease-and-desist from the Olympics Organizing Committee). Nine teams competed, all using Parrot AR.Drones running Node.js software. I was one of the judges.

Winner: James Halliday (“substack”), who wrote an insane virus that infects AR.Drones, which then infect other AR.Drones and causes them all to be p0wned and run amok. 

Authors@Google: Chris Anderson via Beyond the Beyond.

Chris Anderson (formally of WIRED) speaks about his new book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution

Chris is putting his making where is maker is

Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson [HARDCOVER].

In Makers, Wired editor and bestselling author Chris Anderson reveals that a new industrial revolution is under way. Today’s entrepreneurs, using open-source design and 3-D printing, are employing micro-manufacturing techniques to create a tsunami of products in small batches, often customized for specific customers at higher margins.

Every country, to remain economically strong, must make physical products if it doesn’t want to become a nation of burger flippers and checkout clerks. Yet in America and Europe, it has become harder and harder to sustain manufacturing as entire industries, from clothing to electronics, have shifted their factories to Asia and other low-cost regions. In the United States, manufacturing employment as a percentage of total working population is at a century-long low.

The solution, Anderson says, is in a desktop manufacturing revolution that will change the world as much as the personal computer did. The tools of factory production, from digital fabrication to online factory services, are now available to everyone; garage start-ups can make products in batches as small as a single unit or as large as tens of thousands. Anyone with an idea can set assembly lines into motion with little more than a keystroke.

Moreover, thanks to crowdfunding and social financing at companies like Kickstarter and Quirky, entrepreneurs are no longer dependent on venture capitalists or investment banks to finance their ideas. And with the global reach of the Internet, entrepreneurs are able to sell their products to consumers at home and around the world instantly, while start-ups like Etsy create new platforms and markets to bring buyers and sellers together. 

Just as the Web ended the monopoly of mass media, so it is now ending the monopoly of mass manufacturing. Over the next ten years, Anderson explains, countless micro-manufacturers, based on open-source design and DIY manufacturing, will help drive the next big movement in the global economy as the power of bytes—the Long Tail—is transformed into the power to make things again, the Long Tail of things.

http://www.makers-revolution.com/

CHRIS ANDERSON is the editor in chief of Wired, which he has led to multiple National Magazine Award nominations, as well as winning the prestigious top prize for General Excellence in 2005, 2007, and 2009. In 2009, the magazine was named Magazine of the Decade by the editors of AdWeek. He is the co-founder of 3D Robotics, a fast-growing manufacturer of aerial robots, and DIY Drones. Anderson is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Long Tail and Free: The Future of a Radical Price. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In stock and shipping now!

Via DIY Drones.

Check out these instructions for how to make this speedy, 3D-printable blimp design, the silent_runner!

Airships were the most fascinating aircrafts ever crossed the skies and forever will be (well, maybe one day Imperial Star Destroyers will be a bit cooler, but till then airships absolutely rule). So, why not build your own?

Thanks to modern materials and electronics, RC-airships can be incredible fast and agile while consuming very low energy and they are really fun to fly. The Quick Guide will explain in fast and easy steps how to get the silent_runner airship running. For more details look at the Documentation or join us in the airship regatta mailinglist rc_airship_regatta@yahoogroups.com

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has thrilled us at Adafruit with its passion and dedication to making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed that our community integrating electronics projects into 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you take considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless EL Wire and LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you have a cool project you’ve made that joins the traditions of 3D printing and electronics, be sure to send it in to be featured here!

Chris Anderson on Why He’s Leaving Digital for DIY – Technology @ The Atlantic Cities.

Wired’s long-time editor in chief, Chris Anderson, announced on Friday that he was leaving the magazine to become CEO of his DIY-drone company, 3D Robotics. This move comes a month after the release of his latest book, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. In an interview last week (and a brief follow-up after Friday’s announcement), Anderson talked with me about today’s biggest revolution in how and where we actually make things. If the last few decades have been about big digital forces — the Internet, social media — he notes that the future will be about applying all of that in the real world. “Wondrous as the Web is,” he writes, “it doesn’t compare to the real world. Not in economic size (online commerce is less than 10 percent of all sales) and not in its place in our lives. The digital revolution has been largely limited to screens.” But, he adds, the salient fact remains that “we live in homes, drive in cars, and work in offices.” And it is that physical part of the economy that is undergoing the biggest and most fundamental change.

Read more.

3D Robotics announces VC funding, expansion plans! @ DIY Drones.

Last week you may have seen the news that I’m going to be leaving Wired to lead 3D Robotics full time as CEO. Now I’m delighted to announce our other exciting news: last week we closed a $5+ million funding round with two premier firms, which will allow us to accelerate the growth of 3DR and expand into new markets.
 
The round was led by Jon Callaghan at True Ventures and Bryce Roberts of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Both of them will be joining the 3DR board.  These are two of the most far-seeing VCs in the Valley, and both are part of the “hardware is the new software” trend, including investments in Fitbit, Makerbot, Littlebits and Instructables. And they share our vision of the power of open source, the Maker movement and personal robotics. Chris Michel, an investor and long-time entrepreneur (and former Naval Flight Officer) will also be joining as an investor and board member.
 
I’ll be opening an office in the SF Bay Area (“3DR North”), which will focus on sales/marketing and community development. Our San Diego headquarters will continue to be the R&D and engineering center, while our Tijuana manufacturing is expanding to handle more and more of our production. My co-founder, Jordi Munoz, will take over the role of President, overseeing operations.

Read more.

Spatially Targeted Communication and Self-Assembly,” by Nithin Mathews, Anders Lyhne Christensen, Rehan O’Grady, and Marco Dorigo, from Universite Libre de Bruxelles and Instituto Universitario de Lisboa, was presented at IROS 2012 in Vilamoura, Portugal.

MAKE got this massive scoop – Chris Anderson to Leave Wired.

Today Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, announced that he will be leaving Condé Nast at the end of the year to become CEO of 3D Robotics, a company he cofounded several years ago. “This is an opportunity for me to pursue an entrepreneurial dream,” Chris said. “I’m confident that Wired’s mission to influence and chronicle the digital revolution is stronger than ever and will continue to expand and evolve.”

Chris joined Wired as editor in chief in 2001. During his tenure, the magazine received eight National Magazine Awards, including the prestigious top prize for General Excellence in 2005, 2007 and 2009. In 2010, Adweek honored  Wired as its Magazine of the Decade.

As with every brand that challenges the current times and predicts the future, Wired will now embark on the next phase of its quest to determine “what will matter.”  Please join me in thanking Chris for his extraordinary contributions to the Wired franchise. We wish him the best of luck in his new venture and look forward to naming his successor shortly.

Congrats Chris and 3D Robotics!

A small compilation of the late summer shoots. A bit behind-the-camera as well. All shot on Bornholm, Denmark.

Stephen Wolfram Blog : Kids, Arduinos and Quadricopters.

I have four children, all with very different interests. My second-youngest, Christopher, age 13, has always liked technology. And last weekend he and I went to see the wild, wacky and creative technology (and other things) on display at the Maker Faire in New York.

I had told the organizers I could give a talk. But a week or so before the event, Christopher told me he thought what I planned to talk about wasn’t as interesting as it could be. And that actually he could give some demos that would be a lot more interesting and relevant.

Christopher has been an avid Mathematica user for years now. And he likes hookingMathematica up to interesting devices—with two recent favorites being Arduino boards and quadricopter drones.

And so it was that last Sunday I walked onto a stage with him in front of a standing-room-only crowd of a little over 300 people, carrying a quadricopter. (I wasn’t trusted with the Arduino board.)

How big can the Maker Movement get? Can it really restart a manufacturing renaissance in America? Will desktop fabrication have as much impact as desktop computing did? Bre Pettis (MakerBot) and Chris Anderson (Wired/3D Robotics, author of Makers) discuss the lessons learned in building big Maker businesses, and give a glimpse of where they think this movement is going.

ETH – IDSC – Flying Machine Arena.

This video shows three quadrocopters cooperatively tossing and catching a ball with the aid of an elastic net.

To toss the ball, the quadrocopters accelerate rapidly outward to stretch the net tight between them and launch the ball up. Notice in the video that the quadrocopters are then pulled forcefully inward by the tension in the elastic net, and must rapidly stabilize in order to avoid a collision. Once recovered, the quadrotors cooperatively position the net below the ball in order to catch it.

Because they are coupled to each other by the net, the quadrocopters experience complex forces that push the vehicles to the limits of their dynamic capabilities.

Everyone Who Wants a Drone Will Have One Soon – by Alexis C. Madrigal @ The Atlantic via Bruce.

Our Brian Fung brings word that Iran has a drone, and I think it’s reasonable not to worry about it, per se.

But let’s talk about the (very) near future. 

Drones are not like the atomic bomb. There won’t be a day when suddenly we realize that a horrible new weapon has changed the world forever. Instead, one day we’ll wake up and there’ll have been a terrorist attack by a swarm of drones launched by hand from a park across the Potomac from Washington, DC, and no one will know where they came from or who sent them. We’ll wake up one day to a drone peering in our window as preparation for a common burglary. 

The price of these unmanned aerial vehicles is plummeting from two sides. On the one hand, you’ve got the toys like the $70 iHelicopter you control with an iPhone. This little guy even has two plastic missiles you can fire!

…“The upshot of all this is that it’s not going to take much to procure a drone and do anything you want with it. And if you try to outlaw them, then, well, only the outlaws (and government) will have drones.

To me, the best parallel is the improvised explosive device, the IED. This weapon gives every army/police force fits because the tech is cheap and commodity and its action is at a distance. What’s going to stop anyone from turning a cheap drone into a flying IED? Or a swarm of cheap drones into flying IEDs? What’s to stop your neighbor from hovering one above his house and streaming HD video of the neighborhood?…

Flying Robots NYC Meetup Group Announces Inaugural Flying Robot Competition.

Flying Robots NYC Meetup Group Announces Inaugural Flying Robot Competition
Sponsors include 3DRobotics, Adafruit, Falkor Systems, and xCubicle

The Flying Robots NYC meetup group today announced the inaugural Flying Robots NYC competition, to be held in Brooklyn on October 20th. The Flying Robots NYC competition is a project of the Flying Robots NYC Meetup group in order to promote the development of low-cost consumer-accessible flying robot technology. The contest will be held at the Radio Control Society of Marine Park’s field in Marine Park, Brooklyn. Winning contestants will receive valuable prizes provided by the event sponsors.

During the contest competitors will test their flying robots along a number of varied dimensions. Robots will compete on their ability to carry heavy objects and stay aloft for long periods of time. Competitors will also test their ability to build robots that can fly autonomously, sometimes using satellite-based navigation and other times navigating using machine vision technology.

“Competitions are a great way to build local community around new technology,” said Chris Anderson, founder of 3DRobotics, the primary sponsor of the competition, “so we are happy to support the Flying Robots NYC competition.” The first place competitor will receive an open source autopilot system courtesy of 3DRobotics.

“Then open source hardware movement has made flying robot technology accessible to everyone, not just the police and military,” said Sameer Parekh, C.E.O. of group sponsor Falkor Systems, Inc. “This technology has the potential to change the way we live and enrich our lives. Over the next few years more and more people will develop flying robot technology, and they will deploy many robots in commercial applications.”

The Flying Robots NYC group draws extensively from supporters in the local electronics technology community, including support from local sponsors such as Adafruit and xCubicle. Adafruit has offered discounts on their entire catalog to members of the Flying Robots NYC community, and xCubicle has been providing meeting space for group members to meet, plan, and get to know one another.

About 3DRobotics
3DRobotics is the leading vendor of Ardupilot hardware and related accessories. 3DRobotics has already shipped more than 10,000 autopilots. By their estimates, 3D Robotics’ customers are flying more drones than the total number operated by the US military.

About Adafruit
Adafruit was founded in 2005 by MIT engineer, Limor “Ladyada” Fried. Her goal was to create the best place online for learning electronics and making the best designed products for makers of all ages and skill levels. Since then Adafruit has grown to over 25 employees in the heart of New York City. Adafruit has expanded their offerings to include tools and equipment that Limor personally selects, tests and approves. Adafruit has one of the largest collections of free electronics tutorials, open-source hardware and software to help educate and inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.

About Falkor Systems
Falkor Systems, Inc. is an early-stage startup developing autonomous flying robots for the commercial market. The company’s founder / CEO is a successful entrepreneur whose first company developed a pioneering product development strategy which led the United States government to substantially restructure its technology export control policy. The company eventually sold to Red Hat, Inc.

About xCubicle:
xCubicle is a tech shop by day and a hackerspace by night. Conveniently located in Manhattan, they cater to the tech meetup community and host innovative talks in small group settings. 

Flying Robots NYC: http://flyingrobotsnyc.com/
Adafruit: http://www.adafruit.com/about/
3DRobotics: http://store.diydrones.com/
Falkor Systems: http://falkorsystems.com/
xCubicle: http://www.xcubicle.com/

Fall 2012 Competition | Flying Robots NYC. Sameer writes -

The Flying Robots NYC meetup group which has almost 250 members, is organizing a flying robot competition this fall. Details on the competition are here.

For decades, academic and industry researchers have been working on control algorithms for autonomous helicopters — robotic helicopters that pilot themselves, rather than requiring remote human guidance. Dozens of research teams have competed in a series of autonomous-helicopter challenges posed by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI); progress has been so rapid that the last two challenges have involved indoor navigation without the use of GPS.

But MIT’s Robust Robotics Group — which fielded the team that won the last AUVSI contest — has set itself an even tougher challenge: developing autonomous-control algorithms for the indoor flight of GPS-denied airplanes. At the 2011 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), a team of researchers from the group described an algorithm for calculating a plane’s trajectory; in 2012, at the same conference, they presented an algorithm for determining its “state” — its location, physical orientation, velocity and acceleration. Now, the MIT researchers have completed a series of flight tests in which an autonomous robotic plane running their state-estimation algorithm successfully threaded its way among pillars in the parking garage under MIT’s Stata Center.

PX4 Flight and Features Video (Introduction post #2) – DIY Drones.

This platform overview video shows quadrotors in flight, fixed wing hardware in the loop simulation and a novel experimental aircraft. It also introduces all PX4 hardware modules (available from 3D Robotics).

Update: For some reason the video is now marked private

Formula1 quadcopter – DIY Drones via Chris. Jose writes -

Hi all, some weeks ago while I was watching a Formula1 race I started to think in this idea, why not develop a Formula1 shape quadcopter? I was thinking about the best way to fit the shape of an F1 car with a quadcopter and then I started to work on this. With red coroplast plastic and a scissors I made the shape of the car (profile shape) and then I print some stickers from images of the car and this was the result…

We think there will quadcopters races soon