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Drone Flies Into an Active Volcano [video]

dronehire.org

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Re: Drone Flies Into an Active Volcano [video]

#51

Post by baddox »

deletes wrote: post #33
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drones are getting pretty incredible. This one is almost indestructible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl2Z9N4Q82g

It fails as soon as one of the rotors deforms. That doesn't make it very reliable. I wonder how many rotors they went trough the entire lifespan.

I backed their Kickstarter, and have also met the guys and seen those airframes in person at their "Game of Drones: Flight Club" meetups in SF [0]. You're right that they still use normal propellers, and that those will be the weak spot when ramming into things. But the point is simply that the airframe itself is sturdy and nearly indestructible. They're designed to battle in the air against one another, which inevitably causes lots of falls and prop replacements. They're not meant to be "reliable" in the sense that they could fly autonomous missions repeatedly or serve other commercial purposes. They're meant to be beaters.

[0] http://www.gameofdrones.biz/#!sumostory/c2kw

Re: Drone Flies Into an Active Volcano [video]

#52

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

mikeyouse wrote: post #21
uptown wrote: post #3

The Phantom 2 are pretty great drones ... but they're also prone to "fly away" where they decide to take-off on their own - ignoring your commands. There's a bunch of videos on YouTube showing people's Phantoms flying away. Like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkQ9eB7M7iQ This video purports to help prevent that from happening, though it's not guaranteed to prevent your $1000 drone from making a break for it…

Watching an uncontrolled drone strafe an overpass at street level and split power lines for a commuter train, really increases my sympathy toward those who want to regulate these.

Sure, everything has to be regulated; but how do you propose to regulate and then how do you propose to enforce those regulations?

Re: Drone Flies Into an Active Volcano [video]

#53

Post by digz »

nsoldiac wrote: post #38

I'm a Phantom owner and I'm skeptical about those flying time numbers. I get 15-18 minutes on the drone by itself, but if you add the weight of the gimbal and camera (~0.5lb) the flight time goes down at least 4 mins, AND the gimbal needs power from the drone's battery too. I've heard the Phantom's flying time with the working gimbal is more like 6-8 mins. But if you know what kinda shot you want, that could be more…

I get muuuuuch more than 6-8 minutes with my phantom 2 and gimbal. I don't like to push it, so my longest flights are usually ~15 minutes, but I always have at least ~30% battery remaining. In addition to providing power to the gimbal, the phantom 2 is also giving some juice to the gopro, and to a fpv transmitter.

Re: Drone Flies Into an Active Volcano [video]

#54

Post by kefka »

sounds wrote: post #40
Aardwolf wrote: post #35

Amazing! How are the images collected? Is it streaming while the drone flies, or do you have to get the drone back "alive" to retrieve the data from it? How do you control the drone, that is, do you get a first person view of the drone while you control it, or do you have to go with looking at it in the distance?

Edit: Ninja'd by dronehire. Please refer to his answer. Educated guess here, but the article says it's a GoPro camera, so they probably have to get the drone back alive and download the video from the GoPro. On the other hand, wireless HD video streaming isn't that hard to do, especially in remote areas like volcanoes where the 2.4GHz band is pretty much all yours. To do better out of line-of-sight it makes sense to…

400MHz/900MHz are not "slower", it's just that the band plans only allow less bandwidth usage. Because the 2.4GHz band is so high frequency, an individual channel can be bigger. For 802.11B, it's 22MHz channels.

But, it's easier to make a radio using lower frequencies. In the 70 cm band (400~MHz), you can get some ground-wave propagation. But the overall channel size is smaller. With 2.4, its Line of Sight only.

In all honesty, the ideal setup is a low frequency (144MHz or lower) for command and control, with a higher frequency video transmitter. No sense in sending every bit of data down the same pipe.

Source: Me, KC9JEF

Re: Drone Flies Into an Active Volcano [video]

#55

Post by baddox »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #7
Killah911 wrote: post #6

Footage got better by turning the sound off. I wonder if editors in general have poor taste in music or are simply trying to convey their excitement thru dub step background music.

Just curious, which music would you use? This happens to be important to me, so some analysis would be appreciated. EDIT: Assume only a visual feed was available, no audio.

I would prefer that people uploaded their videos with no music, for two reasons.

First, music is a very personal and subjective thing. There's a vanishingly small chance of a video having a song that causes me to discover a new artist that I enjoy, and a large chance I will be annoyed and immediately mute the video.

Second, and more importantly, using copyrighted music makes the video much more likely to be inaccessible on YouTube on mobile devices and tablets.

For drone videos in particular, of which I watch a lot, I vastly prefer just using the audio straight from the camera. Personally, I cut 12 decibels or so, to avoid rupturing the eardrums of viewers with headphones.

Re: Drone Flies Into an Active Volcano [video]

#56

Post by [deleted] »

easy_rider wrote: post #32
Killah911 wrote: post #6

Footage got better by turning the sound off. I wonder if editors in general have poor taste in music or are simply trying to convey their excitement thru dub step background music.

Yes seriously, this was my first thought. The funny thing is that it isn't even dubstep. It is some kind of subgenre that seems to have been the trend for 2013/2014. It sounds like a microsoft surface commercial. I coined the term "clubstep" for it. Looks like someone beat me to it [1]. I've also noted an alarming trend in latest sci-fi movies with this awful music being portrayed still being the hottest thing in clu…

[deleted]

Re: Drone Flies Into an Active Volcano [video]

#57

Post by [deleted] »

baddox wrote: post #48
doctoboggan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cell phone industry has massively driven down the costs of the gyros and accelerometers needed to easily fly a quadcoptor. You also mentioned tiny cameras, another component that benefitted from the economies of scale of the cell phone manufacturers.. For example, you can buy a quadcoptor that fits int he palm of your hand for less than $40: http://www.amazon.com/Estes-4606-Proto-Quadcopter-Black/dp/B...

By the way, that's the best toy quadcopter I've ever used (sample size of 4), and to say it fits in the palm of your hand is overstating its size. Three or four of them would easily fit in the palm of your hand, or the quadcopter and its tiny controller: http://cdn9.modelairplanenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11...

[deleted]

Re: Drone Flies Into an Active Volcano [video]

#58

Post by jccooper »

duiker101 wrote: post #4

Nice footage but I didn't really like the editing. On a side not, damn $900 and it can fly 22 minutes. That sounds very little, I hope this things will improve soon they sound amazingly fun!

22 minutes is quite good. 7 is about normal. Even on the larger ones, you don't often see >10 min.

Actually, the Phantom 2 is said to go 25-30 minutes, but perhaps that's without payload.

This fellow went all-out to get 97 minutes: http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/my-97minute-06second...

Re: Drone Flies Into an Active Volcano [video]

#59

Post by lutusp »

kefka wrote: post #54
sounds wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: Ninja'd by dronehire. Please refer to his answer. Educated guess here, but the article says it's a GoPro camera, so they probably have to get the drone back alive and download the video from the GoPro. On the other hand, wireless HD video streaming isn't that hard to do, especially in remote areas like volcanoes where the 2.4GHz band is pretty much all yours. To do better out of line-of-sight it makes sense to…

400MHz/900MHz are not "slower", it's just that the band plans only allow less bandwidth usage. Because the 2.4GHz band is so high frequency, an individual channel can be bigger. For 802.11B, it's 22MHz channels. But, it's easier to make a radio using lower frequencies. In the 70 cm band (400~MHz), you can get some ground-wave propagation. But the overall channel size is smaller. With 2.4, its Line of Sight only. In a…

> 400MHz/900MHz are not "slower", it's just that the band plans only allow less bandwidth usage.

Yes, but bandwidth = speed, so all else equal, a wider allowed bandwidth produces greater speed.

> In all honesty, the ideal setup is a low frequency (144MHz or lower) for command and control ...

Maybe in a perfect world without anyone else competing for the frequencies. But even without competing uses, higher frequencies have reduced noise problems -- as you go up in frequency, thermal noise declines, so smaller transmitter powers become acceptable (or the same power produces more reliable communications).

But then there's the line-of sight problem, which gets worse at higher frequencies.

Note about radio control that, over decades of time, the command & control frequencies have been going up. There's a good reason -- the original 27 MHz scheme was unworkable for multiple reasons, but one of them was limited bandwidth.

Re: Drone Flies Into an Active Volcano [video]

#60

Post by nlh »

nine_k wrote: post #24
nlh wrote: post #18

This is supremely cool. Tangential stupid question: Obviously there's been a ton of buzz lately (and innovation) in the drone space. What's the big technological driver that's allowed / caused this to happen? I don't know the details of the internals but it seems that the tech has been around for a while (radio controlled planes, servos, helicopters, smallish cameras, etc.).

I'd say Lithium-ion batteries, cheap and power-efficient controllers, cheap sensors (orientation, acceleration, GPS), and the quad-copter layout. With them you can build a device which is lightweight enough to fly for tens of minutes, and can easily orient itself. This lets you control it with high-level commands. You can say "fly there, face north, stand still", something you can't usually say to a traditional helic…

Great answer(s)! (To you and other repliers -- thanks everyone.)

Makes sense. Not one single big thing (i.e. AWS for web companies), but a really great example of one industry benefitting and emerging because of cost improvements and advances in a different industry.

I, for one, continue to be excited about our drone overlords.

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