Chris Anderson, Wired

Talking about a hobby gone horribly wrong :)

Attempt to be a geek and a father, doing fun things with children. Got some model aircraft, played around, crashed a lot. Also had lego mindstorms, but we were never going to be really good at that either. Thought about “airplanes, robotics” what can I do? Ooh, put them together and get a UAV.

Predator UAV costs $4 million.

In a quest to do something cool and original, we realised there was a dimension of aerial robotics that we could compete in, cost. Couldn’t make the best UAV but could make the cheapest. Want to be the minimal UAV project.

Why? Low-cost access to the sky, any time, any place

What if you could have eyes in the sky, low cost ubiquitous access to the sky?

Started by looking at how to simplify the project? Two functions - stabilization project, kinda 3D. Then there’s navigation, following GPS waypoints, kinda 2D. Can use commercial stabilization hardware. How can we do navigation?

Stuck Lego mindstorms in lego planes. Put a camera with lego pan/tilt on the bottom. Got the world’s first semi-lego UAV.

Not autonomous. Brought in bluetooth GPS. Mindstorms has bluetooth. Added accelerometrs, gyros. Now have fully functional inertial measurement. Now have autonomous UAV. Take off manually and land manually, flick switch and it follows waypoints. All driven by lego, cool.

“Turning the military industrial complex into a toy”

Proof of concept, nice to use lego - easy, non-threatening. Have been accused of weaponising lego :)

Taken an export controlled technology and recreated with lego.

How to do cellphone easily? With a cellphone? On-board processing, on-board memory, very good wireless. 2-way communications. Can send text messages with waypoints, it can send back telemetry and imagery through various methods. Strap it to the plane and the autopilot into a software app.

Can do better…

Attach phone to stablisers. Set phone to continous snapping (0.5Hz) mode, get 3cm resolution with toys. When you want it, no waiting for satellites to come around.

Showing photo of the google campus, actually done by UAVs and helicopters. Showing very high resolution image.

You get close to finding out what’s happening right now. Can find that Google don’t really have their logo on their infinite pools.

Responsibility with UAVs. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Something was to be torn down so wanted to record it. Launched easystar with basic “altitude hold”, something went wrong and it went down behind the gates of the secure national laboratory. I could run, call 911, surrender. Or I could go to the gates and explain what happened. I went and took my child with me. They took mercy and found the plane, blew it out with a hose and knocked it down. They collected the pieces and found GPS sensors, cameras, etc. We promised never to do this again.

Embedded processors (under $500). Comparing to Steve Jobs and Wozniak and how they were putting together their own machines. We’re back there now and with open source hardware. Arduino chip. Using FlightGear they’ve created the ArduPilot a $110 open source autopilot. Uses IR stabilization, GPS, fully programmable, can control camera.

“Indoors and under $100?”

Using blimps - BlimpDuino a $70 autonomous blimp using $15 toys from toys’r’us.

DIYDrones website/community. Open source in this context.

Is this legal? We don’t know. Two regulatory classes for UAV, military and commercial. Can get regulatory permission commercially. They never considered that this can be so cheap and easy. Keeping under 400 feet, away from built in areas, have a pilot in control at all time. Trying to be responsible. Cannot ban anything here, these are toys. This is global too. We don’t know how to create regulatory guidelines.

How do we export these? Currently a license is required to export, but we’re an open source community. Some of our participants are teenagers from Iran, but some people would think we shouldn’t do that. I’d rather it was done in public in a community than they just do it on the quiet as all the technology is available now anyway. We’re testing the boundaries of how to get robots and machinery into the skies.

Ending on one picture, “What’s this good for?” “Because we can, because it’s fun, because nobody had done it before”

  • Our job is to make the technology cheap, easy and ubiquitous.
  • Then users will show us what it’s for.

We don’t know what people will do with it, but we’re hoping people will show us.

DIY Drones: An Open Source Hardware and Software Approach to Making “Minimum UAVs”

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