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Awesome Stuff: Towards The Future Of Drones

from the fleye-my-pretties dept

I’ve seen crowdfunding projects for personal drones that promise the moon and obviously fail to deliver — and it’s not surprising that this happens and even sometimes works, given the automatic sci-fi appeal of an autonomous flying assistant that hovers at your side. Today, we’re looking at a project by someone who shares that dream, but who recognizes it’s not going to materialize overnight: Fleye, the personal drone and developer’s platform that represents a step in the direction of that sci-fi future.

The Good

In a world increasingly saturated with drones, there are two things that make the Fleye stand out. The first is its design: unlike most drones, it’s not a quadcopter, but rather is powered by a single blade concealed entirely within its round outer shell. Aesthetically, this is just cool: the Fleye doesn’t look like it should be able to hover and maneuver the way quadcopters do, but it is. Functionally, this serves a key purpose: if the goal is a future where small flying robots operate regularly in human-filled spaces, then the safety factor becomes a real concern, and little bumper rings around exposed high-speed blades simply isn’t going to cut it. The Fleye has nothing on the outside that can hurt you — and watching it gracefully recover after being bumped or shoved is delightful.

The second notable aspect is that the Fleye is focused on being a platform for developers. The creator clearly has a vision of a future full of small autonomous and semi-autonomous drones, hovering over our shoulders and running errands for us and taking our selfies for us — but he also gives the clear impression that he knows this future isn’t “right around the corner” and, in fact, may never even arrive in the vague way we envision it. Rather, he wants to offer a real opportunity for people to explore and experiment in that direction. The Fleye has WiFi, an HD camera, and an on-board computer available in two different models: one with a dual-core and half-gig of RAM, the other with a quad-core and a full gigabyte. All this is wrapped up with an API and an SDK that lets developers create autonomous tasks for the Fleye, leveraging its ability to recognize its surroundings and make split-second adjustments to its course. The Fleye itself, as it is right now, probably isn’t the drone that goes mainstream and starts appearing everywhere — but it may well be the platform that trains the generation of developers who go on to achieve that dream.

The Bad

Drones still face some severe technology limitations, and the Fleye is no exception. For one thing, though the video isn’t entirely clear on this point, it surely makes the same loud and somewhat grating noise that we were all disappointed by the first time we saw a drone flying in person rather than doing graceful silent maneuvers in an audio-dubbed video. Secondly, it still has the limitation of a 10-minute flight time on a full battery charge. Neither of these things are the fault of the Fleye itself, but they do represent technological bottlenecks that diminish the usefulness and appeal of personal drones in general.

The Platform

By default, the Fleye is controlled solely by apps for iOS and Android. Normally this is a very irritating choice, but in the case of the Fleye, it’s actually just a starting point: the drone is controlled by WiFi through an API that uses JSON-over-UDP, meaning virtually any WiFi-connected device is capable of become a controller. The creator is working on SDKs for iOS, Android, NodeJS and Python so people can begin creating their own control software for any and all devices. But that’s just for remote control — the Fleye itself runs on Linux and can be accessed via SSH, deploying custom software directly to the drone so it can then operate autonomously or semi-autonomously to complete tasks you’ve designed. Custom apps don’t need to train the drone from the ground up, as a low-level API within the Linux environment gives custom software easy access to the autopilot functions and video pipeline.

With all these capabilities, I’m excited to see what developers start creating once they get their hands on the Fleye.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, drones, uav

DailyDirt: Speedy Deliveries Coming Via Robots

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The FAA hasn’t exactly been quick to figure out how its going to regulate drones, and its current rules are a bit of an arbitrary mess of trying to determine what “commercial use” really means and how to register pilots and/or the UAVs they fly. Still, plenty of projects are moving forward with plans to use (semi-)autonomous robots to deliver packages more efficiently and quickly.

After you’ve finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: class g airspace, commercial use, drones, faa, multicopter, robotics, robots, tacocopter, uav
Companies: alphabet, google, starship technologies

FAA Investigates Congressman's Use Of Drone To Help Videotape His Wedding

from the watching-the-watchers-watching-themselves dept

Drones: they’re a thing. They were once reserved for the military to use to remote control the fiery death of scary people most of us have never met, some of whom may occasionally, ahem, be, you know, American or whatever. Now all kinds of commercial applications are being explored for these sky-borne death-machines, like getting me my damned tacos delivered through the sky, the way God intended. Well, the FAA went all crazy-pants over the idea of businesses using UAVs, which was followed by the NTSB ruling that the FAA had no jurisdiction over commercial drones. Following an FAA appeal, the agency then decided to claim that drones were only for fun, not profit. You know, like sex.

That brings us to today, where we get to read news about the FAA investigating the use of a drone to take sky-recordings of the wedding of a US Congressman who sits on the subcommittee that oversees the FAA.

The agency’s carefully worded statement doesn’t mention Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., by name, but said it was looking into “a report of an unmanned aircraft operation in Cold Spring, New York, on June 21 to determine if there was any violation of federal regulations or airspace restrictions.”

Maloney has acknowledged hiring a photographer to produce a video of his wedding using a camera mounted on a small drone. The wedding took place in Cold Spring on June 21. Maloney is a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s aviation subcommittee, which oversees the FAA.

Well, if the NTSB can’t get the FAA to calm the hell down about minor commercial uses of drones, darkening the memories of a congressman’s wedding with a pointless investigation sure as hell might. Particularly when that congressman is directly involved in overseeing said FAA. Boys, you may just have bit off a little more than you can chew.

And this all comes off as particularly silly, given that this particular drone is the increasingly common small helicopter with a video recorder attached to it. The chances that this thing is going to interfere with airborne Boeings seem, shall we say, slim.

“On their wedding day, Sean and Randy were focused on a ceremony 22 years in the making, not their wedding photographer’s camera mounted on his remote control helicopter,” Stephanie Formas, spokeswoman for Maloney, said in a statement. Formas, citing the judge’s ruling, said there was “no enforceable FAA rule” or regulation that applied to “a model aircraft like the helicopter used in the ceremony.”

I rather expect that point to be driven home at an upcoming subcommittee meeting.

Filed Under: commercial use, drones, faa, house transportation and infrastructure committee, ntsb, patrick maloney, uav, videotape, weddings

from the let's-get-this-going... dept

Almost exactly two years ago, we wrote about the tacocopter, a sort of proof of concept idea for using drones to deliver products to people’s homes. Yes, Amazon got some attention last year for claiming to be working on something similar, but the Tacocopter (and Lobstercopter on the east coast) idea was the first I’d heard of anyone seriously thinking about commercial-use drones. However, the key point of our Tacocopter story was that they were illegal:

Current U.S. FAA regulations prevent … using UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, like drones] for commercial purposes at the moment.

Well, that’s no longer the case apparently. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) administrative law judge Patrick Geraghty has unleashed the tacocopters of the world by issuing a ruling that the FAA has no mandate to regulate commercial drones. The case involved the first time that the FAA had actually tried to fine someone, a guy named Raphael Pirker, $10,000 for trying to film a commercial with a drone at the University of Virginia.

The issue, basically, is that the FAA has historically exempted model airplanes from its rules, and the NTSB finds it impossible to square that with its attempt to now claim that drones are under its purview. As Geraghty notes, accepting that leads to absurd arguments about the FAA’s mandate over all flying objects:

Complainant has, historically, in their policy notices, modified the term “aircraft” by prefixing the word “model”, to distinguish the device/contrivance being considered. By affixing the word “model” to “aircraft” the reasonable inference is that Complainant FAA intended to distinguish and exclude model aircraft from either or both of the aforesaid definitions of “aircraft”.

To accept Complainant’s interpretive argument would lead to a conclusion that those definitions include as an aircraft all types of devices/contrivances intended for, or used for, flight in the air. The extension of that conclusion would then result in the risible argument that a flight in the air of, e.g., a paper aircraft, or a toy balsa wood glider, could subject the “operator” to the regulatory provisions of FAA Part 91, Section 91.13(a)….

….. The reasonable inference is not that FAA has overlooked the requirements, but, rather that FAA has distinguished model aircraft as a class excluded from the regulatory and statutory definitions.

The judge notes that while the FAA had some internal memorandum about these issues, it did not put forth a full rule, and thus it is not an actual policy. As a result, the ruling finds that the current definition of aircraft is not applicable here and thus the FAA has no real mandate over this kind of drone.

This does not preclude the FAA from trying to go through a full rule-making process to try to gain a mandate over commercial drone use, but that will involve a big political fight. It’s way easier to block something like that from becoming official than overturning it if it was already deemed the law.

Filed Under: drone, faa, ntsb, patrick geraghty, raphael pirker, tacocopter, uav

FEMA Grounds Private Drones That Were Helping To Map Boulder Floods, Threatens To Arrest Operators

from the heckuva-job dept

As you may have heard, Boulder, Colorado has been hit by massive flooding over the past week, and it’s been something of a mess. A local company, Falcon UAV, makers of special drones which are built for the government, approved by the FAA, and specialize in using GPS and cameras to generate highly accurate maps, started helping to map the damage with those drones. It was basically making very useful, near real-time maps showing the floods. You’d think that would be useful to, say, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency in charge of helping to coordinate the response to the floods. Instead, FEMA ordered the drones grounded or it would have people from Falcon UAV arrested. Once again, this isn’t just some guy with a toy quadcopter trying to take photos. These are drones designed for this sort of thing. As the company explains, this grounding made little sense, and possibly held back relief efforts.

Early Saturday morning Falcon UAV was heading up to Lyons to complete a damage assessment mapping flight when we received a call from our Boulder EOC point of contact who notified us that FEMA had taken over operations and our request to fly drones was not only denied but more specifically we were told by FEMA that anyone flying drones would be arrested. Not being one to bow to federal bureaucrats we still went up to Lyons to do a site survey for how we can conduct a mission in the near future to provide an adequate damage assessment to this storm ravaged community.

While we were up there we noticed that Civil Air Patrol and private aircraft were authorized to fly over the small town tucked into the base of Rockies. Unfortunately due to the high terrain around Lyons and large turn radius of manned aircraft they were flying well out of a useful visual range and didn’t employ cameras or live video feed to support the recovery effort. Meanwhile we were grounded on the Lyons high school football field with two Falcons that could have mapped the entire town in less than 30 minutes with another few hours to process the data providing a near real time map of the entire town.

[…] We are very disappointed in FEMAs response to actively prevent the use of UAVs and drone technology when these services were offered for free and at a time when manned helicopters could be used for more critical missions such as evacuations and high mountain search and rescues in inaccessible communities.

Sure, you can understand why federal officials would be initially careful about what was happening, but Falcon UAV had already been working with local Boulder County officials to do this effort, and it was clear that what its drones were doing was helpful. Shutting it down with no explanation and threatening to arrest the operators just seems like FEMA shoving people around because it can.

Filed Under: boulder, drones, fema, flooding, uav
Companies: falcon uav