Meet Blue Jay, The Flying Drone Pet Butler

20 students of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands share one vision of the future: the fully domesticated drone pet – a flying friend that helps you whenever you need it and in general, is very, very cute. Their drone “Blue Jay” is packed with sensors, has a strong claw for grabbing and carrying cargo, navigates autonomously indoors, and interacts with humans at eye level.

blue_jay_droneTo demonstrate their flying buddy, the team installed the drone café – a café in which visitors were served drinks by the interactive drone. The café was open for only a few days this April as part of the “Dream & Dare Festival”, an event that celebrated the 60th anniversary of the TU/e. Our Dutch readers can still meet the team and their flying minion during the DTW – Dutch Technology Week from May 23 to 26, 2016.

The team sees great potential for drones to become useful in people’s everyday lives in the form of a friendly butler. Not only could drones detect fires or intruders in your home, but also fly ahead and autonomously deal with such problems when you can not. The drone could also serve you and your guests with drinks or food, and sooner or later become your best friend. We are sure the drones will be putting themselves to the fullest possible use, which is all we think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do. Enjoy the video:

[via heise]

18 thoughts on “Meet Blue Jay, The Flying Drone Pet Butler

  1. Battery life is not up to this kind of thinking. So we are at least a century away from higher battery power density. Sensor capabilities are not up to the level needed for an “interactive ” drone.

    1. They will probably just stick a camera on it, film and map out your hours in high resolution 3D and upload the data to their servers database. Then to moves the drone can request/download 60 seconds of commands it should execute to move from A to B every second (59 second buffer). And have a failure mode, if the communications link to the central server farm is lost, go land in the recharge station.

  2. Neat, though if I were going to have a robot Butler I’d prefer one of those darpa robots that’s electrically powered and the size of a very big dog. Give it a tail manipulator and some legs that can lock to give it a low power mode and bingo!

  3. Haha dogs are cats everywhere are going to love these! Also the sound from a drone this big for extended periods in an relatively enclosed space would probably cause some hearing damage, no? Can’t be good for you anyway. I hope they come with good batts and chargers, a lipo exploding at eye level would probably ruin your day.

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