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Lily – Drone camera

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Re: Lily – Drone camera

#251

Post by semi-extrinsic »

grecy wrote: post #169
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going any slower than 40 km/h the only thing you'll be doing in a terrain park is falling on your face. This [1] cable-driven terrain park "for children and adults" pulls you at 40 km/h. If you're looking at landing anything bigger than a 360 you'll need to be going closer to 60 km/h. Ski racers are not happy until they're going (a lot) faster than 90. [1] http://www.al.no/en/html/aktiviteter/vinter/ski_sno…

I'm a level 3 snowboard instructor in Canada, and I would say I infrequently go over 40km/h. It's only when I stand still on a groomer and "go fast", or for the run-in for the L/XL jumps.

Have you actually measured your speed though? Because the difference in speed sensation between a snowboard and a car (or bicycle) is just unbelievable if you haven't measured it.

The pull rope I linked above is for kids with small/medium jumps, and that's 40 km/h.

Re: Lily – Drone camera

#253

Post by ceequof »

baddox wrote: post #203
JeffL wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a tripod that automatically tracks you. I get ads for it on YouTube all the time. http://www.gizmag.com/soloshot-automated-tripod/25453/

I haven't been able to figure out how these work. GPS alone wouldn't give the resolution and responsiveness required. It doesn't seem to be CV-based either, since there's often no line of sight of the tracking device. Perhaps the tripod has two directional signal strength sensors so it can tell if the beacon is to the left or right, and move in order to keep the beacon centered.

The popular theory is that it's a RTK differential GPS system: base station in the tripod transmitting correction information to the remote unit. The explains the warmup time, the accuracy, as well as the big price tag.

http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/73083/how-doe...

Re: Lily – Drone camera

#254

Post by tajen »

grecy wrote: post #235
ep103 wrote: post #197

It would be cool if the remote in your pocket had a "Call 911!" button. So like, if I was out snowboarding, and saw an avalanche coming, I probably wouldn't be able to call 911. But this little drone is a good deal above me and the avalanche/murderer/shark/whatever, it could call 911 for me, and when they recovered it, it would have video of what happened to me. It could even fly towards a preset location (known rang…

In an avalanche you can't call anyone to save you. It will take them too long to reach you, and you'll suffocate before they can reach you. The chances of survival drop severely after 15 minutes of burial. The only people that can save you in an Avalanche are the people in your group. Source: Canadian ski patroller.

What if the drone has a 2-3m acuracy of the position? At least in ski resorts the bystanders can immediately rescue the person. Off tracks, it often happens that 1 person is aside of the snow corridor.

Re: Lily – Drone camera

#255

Post by Crito »

ep103 wrote: post #197

It would be cool if the remote in your pocket had a "Call 911!" button. So like, if I was out snowboarding, and saw an avalanche coming, I probably wouldn't be able to call 911. But this little drone is a good deal above me and the avalanche/murderer/shark/whatever, it could call 911 for me, and when they recovered it, it would have video of what happened to me. It could even fly towards a preset location (known rang…

I thought they already had these specifically for avalanches, minus the drone. Some sort of tracking beacon that you can carry around, that will lead them to your body.

Re: Lily – Drone camera

#256

Post by jjwiseman »

I applied to YC with a speech interface for drones, one application of which would be hands-free operation of selfie drones like this. E.g., if you're mountain biking you probably don't want to take one hand off the handlebars and try to press the button on the remote that means "Switch to leading shot". Instead, you'd just talk into your earbud: "Switch to leading shot" or "Climb to 100 feet", or more complex cinematographic instructions like "Pan from me to tracker B"

Especially in the extreme sports selfie video genre, hands-free operation would be a big advantage.

Re: Lily – Drone camera

#257

Post by OrwellianChild »

ricardobeat wrote: post #212

List of previous similar products: https://www.airdog.com http://hexoplus.com https://store.3drobotics.com/products/iris http://www.airmind.co

Thanks for these! Prices/status for reference:

           Status       Release    Price
           -----------  ---------  ------------
  AirDog*  Pre-Order    Q3 2015    $1,295
  HEXO+*   Pre-Order    Sept 2015  $1,299
  IRIS+*   Available    Now        $750
  Mind4*   Kickstarter  Failed     $900-$1,489
  Lily     Pre-Order    Feb 2016   $519-$1,019

  *Note that all but Lily require a $300 GoPro camera.
Price ranges are for Pre-Order vs. Post-Ship pricing.

EDIT: Found Lily release date...

Re: Lily – Drone camera

#258

Post by Raphael »

thenomad wrote: post #184
stinos wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One motor suddenly failed Maybe drones need to start to incorporate parachutes to slow down the fall in case of problems like these, or maybe even airbags to ease the crash. Not that it would make it 99.9999% reliable, but it should be better than nothing. And also won't completely thrash your drone when it crashes. edit seems nine_k already commented with a similar idea

One parachute-for-drone is already being Kickstarted (at least). But the issue is the effective minimum height for a parachute to be any use.

Perhaps an airbag underneath could deploy faster.

Re: Lily – Drone camera

#259

Post by Phlarp »

dharma1 wrote: post #234
lsaferite wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If you are flying over people AT ALL you should be using an octocopter at least.

it can still drop from the sky, you are just getting a bit more redundancy on motors/props but doesn't help if they all stop due to something else

Once you have redundancy in the powertrain, getting redundancy from a flight computer is relatively straight forward. At that point 3 rotors on one side of the craft or multiple computers have to all fail simultaneously to cause a real loss of control, and even then algorithmic changes can be made to the flight computer to allow semi-controlled landings with multiple prop failures.

Re: Lily – Drone camera

#260

Post by darkmighty »

baddox wrote: post #203
JeffL wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a tripod that automatically tracks you. I get ads for it on YouTube all the time. http://www.gizmag.com/soloshot-automated-tripod/25453/

I haven't been able to figure out how these work. GPS alone wouldn't give the resolution and responsiveness required. It doesn't seem to be CV-based either, since there's often no line of sight of the tracking device. Perhaps the tripod has two directional signal strength sensors so it can tell if the beacon is to the left or right, and move in order to keep the beacon centered.

This is by requirement line of sight. So indeed a cheap radio frequency tracker should be able to do the job. There are just minor issues with multipath and transmitter power.

EDIT: The included antenna is a wifi-like omnidirectional antenna, so I guess it's just using GPS. The precision is greatly improved due to large distances (linear precision is amplified into angular precision by O(distance) )

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