401–410 of 496 posts
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I would love Mythbusters to throw the biggest drone you can get into a jet engine. Pretty sure nothing, but some good entertainment would happen.
I'm fairly confident it would destroy the jet engine. The shrapnel from the drone is likely to blow the very tight tolerances between the compressor blades and the body of the jet engine, causing jams.
This seems kind of implausibly cheap for what it's offering.
So either 1) they expect you to pay more later 2) they are selling the preorders at a loss (woo venture funding! do things that don't scale!) or 3) their markup will be huge (>100%) when they start making regular sales.
The FAA doesn't appear to have any guidance on automated flying: e.g., it doesn't say anything (at least in a 1m search) about a human pilot. (I was surprised by this.) So long as you stay within recreational use guidelines (e.g., don't upload videos to YouTube), you should be fine.
Video made me want to have a more active life. I thought "cool!" but then I imagined my video output would be hours of me typing, browsing HN & Reddit.
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A consumer follow-me quad with a youtube camera launched via kickstarter? Probably not. A future DJI aerial photography product with a 4000-8000 price tag? Absolutely. If Amazon ever intends to deploy these for actual package delivery instead of just PR they'll need redundant computers with a voting system, fault tolerant flight control algorithms with some kind of fault case detection and some kind of failsafe parac…
Absolutely, for the higher end. What scares me is these consumer drones with inexperienced pilots/autonomous tech without proper failsafes. I'm pretty sure they will be banned from ski slopes etc pretty quick. Optical flow can hold pretty stable when GPS is unavailable, other types of CV like SLAM even better.
Optical flow can hold position pretty well-- but will they be able to figure out how to navigate by it!?
This is great. Now, we're just waiting for better batteries: stretching out 20 minutes of flight time across a day or even morning of skiing, kayaking, etc. is going to be difficult. I guess you can carry batteries with you.
Battery is not removable.
I wonder how this handles obstacles. The trails we ride are not wide open ski slopes, or rivers, often times they are tight/wooded trails. Would like to see how it handles "close following". Lastly, the part in the video where the guy just tosses it into the river was definitely mind-blowing.
This is the big reason people don't buy these types of drones (this one certainly isn't the first of it's kind). It doesn't have obstacle avoidance or it will make a massive deal of it.
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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...
This was my question on Stack Exchange! I was so angry because I was so curious how this worked, but I was downvoted to hell.