Cameras Perch On Power Lines, Steal Electricity

June 28, 2010 by Mike Szczys 74 Comments

[Tim] let us know about a video outlining some covert camera devices the Air Force is developing (dead link, try the Internet Archive version). The video takes a lot of time to explain induction to those who’ve never heard of it but we liked to see the bird-like concept animations. They’ve already developed cameras that will clamp on to power lines in order to use induction as a power source. Shown in the video is an eight-rotor quadcopter they’re hoping to use to deliver the camera covertly. But the animations show a winged robot similar to a hawk that has a camera for a head. Having seen some of the other flying devices in development this may not actually be that far off.

Quadcopter Acrobatics Like Nothing We’ve Seen

May 28, 2010 by Mike Szczys 37 Comments

The University of Pennsylvania has churned out some impressive moves with a quadcopter. Perching on a vertical landing pad with some help from Velcro is impressive, but single and double flips combined with navigating through tight spaces at an angle makes this just amazing. We expect to see it in the next Bond film if it doesn’t show up in one of this summer’s action flicks. Kind of makes previously awesome quadcopters look a bit pedestrian. Video after the break.

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Aircraft Carrier Is Moving Target For Autonomous Quadcopter

May 25, 2010 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

[Karl-Engelbert Wenzel] developed a UAV capable of taking off and landing on a moving platform autonomously. The platform operates aircraft-carrier-style by driving around the room in circles. The quadcopter tracks a grid of IR LEDs at the front of the landing deck by using the IR camera from a Wii remote. The best part is that the flight controls and processing are all done by the copter’s onboard ATmega644 processor, not requiring a connection to a PC. The landings are quite accurate, achieving a maximum error of less than 40 centimeters. In the video after the break you can see the first landing is slightly off the mark but the next two are dead on target.

So build yourself a mobile platform and pair it up with your newly finished quadcopter to replicate this delightful hack.

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Wyvern quadcopter

May 3, 2010 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

[William Etter] and his classmates built a quadcopter as a class project. We love the details of these builds and they came through with some thorough documentation. Some highlights that we enjoyed were reading about ABS body design and construction, their analysis of two versus three blade propellers, and their breadboarded control mechanism. You can see their success in the most recent post, but we all know that trial and error plays a role in these builds so we’re glad they’ve shared a collection of crashes with us.

Can’t get enough of this four-rotor action? Check out this project of a similar design.

AeroQuad – Build Your Own Quadcopter

January 15, 2010 by Mike Szczys 58 Comments

It hurts us to look at this quadcopter, agonizingly so when we watch the video after the break. That’s because we feel the unstoppable compulsion to build one. This four-rotor helicopter has a lot to be proud of; it features Gyro stabilization, Xbee remote control for very long distance operation, and computer interface for data graphing and calibration.

We like the quadcopter that we came across at CES but building one of our own is more fun than buying it ready-made. The pain we’re feeling is mostly in our pocketbook. To help ease the agony we scoured the parts list and the assembly instructions in order to get an estimate of what this might cost. We’re looking at around $415 plus shipping, not including transmitter and receiver for controlling it. Yep, that’s a sharp stabbing pain but we’re not sure we can just let it go.

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CES: Parrot AR Drone Update

January 8, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 8 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL9nCShB9Ac]

Here’s a small update on the AR Drone from Parrot. We finally got this video uploaded. It isn’t anything fantastic, but you get a good view of the board on the bottom of the device. You can clearly see a tiny camera in the middle and what looks like sonar range finders toward the front of the drone.

As some commenters have stated, this looks like a more robust platform of the X-UFO. We haven’t seen the X-UFO, but the salesperson even mentioned it. Check out some flight video after the break. We’ve shot some flight video of our own that we’ll have up soon. Continue reading “CES: Parrot AR Drone Update” →

25C3 Hardware Workshops

December 7, 2008 by Eliot 7 Comments

quadcopter

The 25C3 team has a post highlighting some of the hardware workshops that will be happening at Chaos Communication Congress this year. Our own [Jimmie Rodgers] will be in the microcontroller workshop area building kits with many others. The folks from mignon will be bringing several of their game kits for another workshop. We saw quite a few quadcopters at CCCamp and the team from Mikrokopter will be back to help you construct your own drone. They say it only takes five hours for the full build, but space is limited.