Very cool, but notice what kind of room they fly in - they're using cameras to control the quadcopters, they're not autonomous, which means that if you put them outside, they wouldn't work.
There might still be some practical uses that do not require complete autonomy. I can imagine e.g. fleets of such quadrocopters flying inside buildings, tied to security cameras. Law enforcement would probably love this.
This assumes the existing radio links can handle the extra bandwidth. I don't see a WiFi card, so they may use radios with low-baud serial connections. Maybe the radios are good enough that doubling the radio communications is fine. Now, all the new hardware means extra draw (and potentially extra batteries) on each quadrotor. They might fly with this extra weight, but it won't be nearly as long.
Also, indoor flying means no GPS. In this case, using accelerometers means something is dead-reckoning the position of each quadrotor. There's no more space/power for processing juice, so the external system must do this. Now the external system must take this localized data from each quadrotor and place it in some global coordinate system (how does it do that?). It will use dead-reckoning to determine the position of each quadrotor. This means the system is accumulating errors over time, for each quadrotor. At least sailors could eventually correct their position with stars - there is no real global correction with these sensors. They could hypothetically do radio range estimation on the radio signals of the quadrotors, but who knows what kind of accuracy they will get.
Correct. However, indoor positioning tech will likely come of age in the next 12-18 months driven by indoor mapping and navigation. Once that becomes commoditized, it'll make positioning a little aircraft like this in the x,y plane of a floorplan doable without dead-reckoning. From there, you could probably do some crude lidar to measure the distances above/below the craft to the ceiling/floor.
Actually ... that would be a very difficult step to perform. The room they fly in has a very expensive, sophisticated, high-speed motion capture system that gives a global picture of the placement of each vehicle. The data is then feed to a bank of computers for real-time processing. There's a reason they only show videos in that one room.
The data from individual sensors would be very noisy.
I completely disagree. None of those sensors would likely give anywhere near the accuracy, frame rate, or context of the current system. Also, there is the issue of where the computation is done. It seems obvious to me that the intended goal is a decentralized system, where every vehicle is autonomous and creates an internal model of its own surroundings. As best I can tell, in the current system all the computation and dispatching so instructions is done by a single centralized external computer (the one the external cameras are attached to).
Personally, I've operated accelerometers and gyros at 200 Hz after some low-pass filtering, which is really all you need for this application. I'm sure there are sensors that operate at even higher frequencies if need be. The GPS module doesn't have to be updated too fast (maybe 10 Hz?) because it only serves to correct for horizontal drift.
I run the 100 Hz flight control loop for my tricopter on an ATmega1280 clocked at 16 MHz. A _lot_ more could be done with something like the Beagleboard, including generating a 3D map of the surroundings if I mounted a Kinect on it.
I want to agree about the decentralized operation because there would be so many wireless signals that could interfere, but those guys seem to be controlling 20 quadrotors without problems. I know XBees can be configured to communicate on different channels, but decentralized operation will most likely require something beefier like wifi (and that, I don't know how to configure to work over so many different channels).
Even in best case scenario, I'm not sure GPS would be accurate enough, as it's only accurate down to few centimeters, you'd probably need more if you'd like to perform that kind of acrobatics as shown in the video. And what about the height? You could of course use GPS, but apparently (http://users.erols.com/dlwilson/gpsvert.htm), average consumer devices have error of few meters. Maybe we could use laser range finders pointed at the ground, but what if the quadcopter tilts? Or what if another quadcopter flies underneath it? Of course it's not unsolvable, but it'd probably require more computing power in the quadcopter.
I think LIDAR is the most likely solution. With enough resolution, you could get a reasonable 3D map of the vehicle's surroundings with a very accurate relative model of where the vehicle is located.
The wireless becomes the issue then, as the network effect quickly takes over.
Sensing at high speed with bad sensors and low power/computation is really tough.
Surveillance drones were already used by the police in South Africa during the national elections back in 1994, in that case on loan from the Air Force. After further successful deployments in the years since, the SA Police Service is considering issuing an RFP for a small UAV fleet.
Conceptually, surveillance-only UAVs are not dissimilar from police helicopters, which have been used for decades without massive privacy issues. In fact, when evaluating the option between acquiring a larger UAV platform or additional manned helicopters with high-end electro-optical camera gear for the Football World Cup, the local police went went for the helicopters as they performed better in that specific role and there was no cost saving.
I don't see much chance of police departments weaponising UAVs any time soon either. Not only does it push up the cost significantly, but there are accuracy and liability issues that will take some time to sort out. At most I could see helicopter-based UAVs being used to drop tear-gas near crowds and even that's iffy.
Excellent point, although we're still quite far from the point where that sort of technology exists and is cheap enough for police to be able to buy.
You'd also have to presume that if technology has progressed that far then things like extremely accurate long-range cameras and the ability to record sound from some distance away by measuring the vibrations on glass will also be available to them.
To some extent this is already here; the local police here have recently begun using a mobile van with a mast-mounted optical ball and have made arrests using footage captured as far as 3km away. Similar technology has been used to watch over the Occupy Wall Street protestors in NYC and elsewhere.
Point is the ability of the state to conduct surveillance on its citizens, both close-up and from a distance, is only going to increase. Fretting about individual pieces of technology misses the big picture, which is that only changes to the law and proper oversight will prevent it from happening.
They're closer in concept (and presumably in deployment scale) to mobile CCTV cameras than they are to police helicopters, and there certainly have been privacy issues with those.
I'm not so sure. With the latest electro-optical turrets a helicopter can be pretty far away and still get usable footage. During the Football World Cup I observed some police helicopters orbiting just about out of earshot during their operations.
I've also seen a demonstration of an experimental locally-produced surveillance camera (in this case intended for maritime observation) that was able to display the name on a small boat 20-30km out to sea. Granted, the camera was mounted on the top of a mountain to get the required height, but nonetheless the technology was phenomenal.
The difference between all the different varieties of surveillance technologies is starting to blur quite a bit.
There's a huge difference in price, though. The numbers will probably work out that you can throw up a hundred or so drones for the price of a single helicopter. With a single expensive platform, expensive optics and highly trained operators make sense.
I very much would love to set up a bunch of these quadrocopters to circle my house and use them as security cameras. I'm not sure how long it would take for that, but if you could set up something like 20 of these, have them continuously rotate around the house perimeter, recording everything, and then come back to recharge with another one taking off, I think that would be pretty awesome.
As someone who flys rc helicopters (both gas and electric) I can assure you that quadracopters of that size in no way could hold up under wind speed that would be typical from day to day. And making them larger would present a safety hazard.
For fun! I think it would be pretty cool project to program those drones, etc. I'm pretty sure the security benefits would be low, and like someone else said, kids throwing stuff at it would suck. But then you can program in counter measure, maybe a water cannon, etc...
I've had similar thoughts. Another purpose your testing mobile security which you could potentially resell to businesses and eventually to the military.
build a dependable prototype that you could resell to business that have storage units, and someone with a warehouse that needs security, or a museum even.
I enjoy how references to The Diamond Age are becoming more and more common in tech beloved by the hacker community. Increases my excitement for the future! I want my matter compiler already.
It's interesting to reread The Diamond Age in the context of the recent fights over IP. When manufacturing is almost free, what gives one object value over another? Its design and software--the IP. In TDA, stealing IP was how smaller organizations competed with and disrupted larger more established ones. No organization in the world is larger and more established than the U.S.--hence the increasingly strong efforts of the U.S. government to defend IP.
Anyone have some tips on the small components? Most of what I seem to find on the drone forums is about larger devices, maybe upwards of a foot and a half or two feet across.
I found that incredible, amazing, stunning but also hilarious for some reason. I don't know why but it funny seeing them all working together like that.
Still, pretty damn impressive.