It's too bad the AR.Drone only has a battery life of 10 minutes...
Though I suppose that for this, where you want it staying in pretty much the same place for many hours, you really want a Terror Blimp instead of a copter.
Wired asks: Why are Occupy not flying their own drones?
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Tags: big brother, blimps, conspiracies, mpegs, robots, scene missing, security, space, the future
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19 Responses:
It would be interesting to see a solution that is adapted to an urban environment. If we assume that the protest lines are mostly fixed, and the area is surrounded by (tallish) buildings, then the challenge isn't so much to keep a drone in orbit above, but rather to get a camera to a static location with good sight-lines from where it can broadcast.
I.e. fly a camera over the scene & find a ledge to land on & film from. Decreased flight time means more payload available for batteries, and therefore more broadcast time.
I did see one guy at oakland with a camera on a 15' pole. tethered balloons with cameras would also give some additional intel, and could be ground-powered.
Yes! I have asked the same question, since an eye-in-the-sky would be mighty useful not just from an observatatory point-of-view, but a photographic one as well.
As to battery life... Perhaps a camera-toting blimp? Or dirigible? Seems a panorama camera made of cell phone cameras could easily be hoisted aloft by a few regular balloons, even.
I think the reason "why not" is because it would confirm every pants-wetting police-state fantasy that the authorities probably have about the protesters. Citizens are barely allowed to carry "professional-looking cameras" anymore. I can easily imagine the trumped up charges and right wing mania that would be unleashed in response to "unmanned drones." "According to our experts such a device could be carrying chemical or biological weapons and there's no way to know!!!!"
I was just wondering last night how much amateur UAV activity takes place at Burning Man...
Those gas powered model airplane guys are probably more Tea Partiers than Occupyers, but you never know...
Whoever is flying that AR Drone in the video has added a thrid party spy cam to the drone & isn't using the built in. How do I know? As far as I've been able to research, there no iOS or Android app that provides for recording of both audio and video. There is an iOS app to record video (no android one yet) but it doesn't record audio. The drone itself with no extra batteries costs $300 so add extra batteries, an additional 3rd party spy cam with mic and software capable of capturing/recording the flight and you're probably looking at close to an $800 investment. Maybe that's why you don't see a lot of occupy protesters with their own spy drones!
There's nothing in that video that says it was shot by an AR.Drone. It's also only using one camera, and the AR.Drone has two (forward and straight down). But, if you wanted audio out of an AR.Drone (which means "if you want a soundtrack of unrelenting prop noise") you could just duct tape a 2oz audio recorder to it, for the 10 min that it will fly.
I can tell by the sound that it's an AR Drone, and realistically, you probably cannot tape a mic to the bottom because the Parrot FAQs actually advise against attaching anything to the drone (they said, no matter how small) because it makes it unstable and can cause it to crash. For that same reason, it's probable the user made some custom modifications to either allow for recording of sound & audio with the supplied camera(s), with ability to toggle them on/off separately, and/or they modified the unit itself to accommodaye the extra weight of a 3rd party spy cam.
Even if it you're right and it's an AR and not one of the zillions of other multi-rotor copters out there, nobody in their right mind would pay an additional $500 just to get the compelling and riveting soundtrack captured in that video.
One would hope they wouldn't, yes but enthusiasts aren't known for being fiscally responsible, nor do we know who the person is behind the video. It could be a marketing video intended to drive sales by giving the illusion of functions that might not be possible without expensive optional add-ons. The old " make it look better than it really is" bait and switch. Like when the car ads show the model with thousands of dollars of optional items but they display the base price, indicating it is available starting at that price though of course without all the cool stuff shown in the ad.
Doubtful, AR's marketing tended more toward How to be a Dick With Your UAV. (Which was a great campaign, really.)
Looks like lots of folks are modding AR.Drones to add GoPro cameras to them, since those are only 96 grams. Here's a rather involved mod, and here's one that I assume is just duct tape.
"I can tell by the sound"? Is that the new "I can tell by the pixels"? A tiny motor driving a fan sounds pretty much the same.
From the video it looks like it isn't an AR.Drone, since they don't fly as stable once you get out of the range of the ultrasonic units on the bottom. It looks like it has GPS compensation.
It's a Y6 with a 60D attached. Source below (contains Polish):
http://lubczasopismo.salon24.pl/jamajka/post/365300,gratulacje-dla-firmy-robokopter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD3oeLNFYtE&t=1m4s
http://www.robokopter.pl/
(Apologies for injecting facts into this jolly internet argument.)
doubt it's an Parrot AR drone, they are pretty hard to fly that high and they don't deal at all well with wind. It's probably one of the more expensive kit based quadcopters
The reason why you don't see more of them is a good quadcopter spydrone, one that can stay up for hours not minutes and won't get blown to hell and back by the smallest breeze, costs $5K+ and doesn't seem to be available to civilians
It's not probably anything; check my links above.
Two of the OWS livestreamers are planning to deploy ARDrone. Occupy Air Force >> Occupy Signal Corps.
Hmm -- offtopic, but I wonder if you could attach some lift assist (i.e. balloons) to an ARDrone to extend the flight lifetime.