quadrocopter

Bart Jansen had two cats, named Orville and Wilbur, after the famous flying Wright brothers of Kitty Hawk. When dear Orville passed away, the visual artist and designer created a new kind of Kitty Hawk.

The Orvillecopter is a quadrocopter with Orville's skin stretched over it. Orville was killed by a car, Jansen mourned, and then he went about concocting a tribute.… Read more

With all the James Bond theme song-playing and tower-building quadrocopters these days, it's a little hard to get excited about new personal-size automated aerial projects. But how can you not get worked up by a bird robot that can cross a room and land gracefully on someone's hand?

Aerospace engineering researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have "duplicated the control functions that allow birds to successfully perform a soft landing--in this case, perching on a human hand."

The above video's a bit scientific for the average layman (read: me) but suffice it to say, the researchers -- Soon Jo Chung, Aditya Paranjape, and Joseph Kim -- have created a micro-aerial vehicle (MAV) that can fly nimbly across a room and then pull up at just the right moment for a soft landing at a specific place, or on someone's hand. … Read more

With a name like SkyNET, it's got to be scary. This flying robo-hacker deserves its "Terminator"-inspired moniker: Although it stops short of actually hunting humans, it's a potential nightmare for anyone with a wireless home network. Worse, it's a DIYer's dream: cheap and easy to build and fun to operate.

SkyNET combines a toy helicopter and a computer configured to attack Wi-Fi networks. The result is a drone the CIA would be proud of. The nasty little device can compromise computers on wireless networks and dragoon them into botnets. Botnets are widely used for hacking, denial-of-service attacks, and spamming.

The devious beauty of SkyNET is that by controlling the botnet from a drone rather than an Internet connection, the botmaster is harder to track down. To catch the bad guy you'd have to figure out that a drone is involved, spot the drone, and follow it back to its owner (assuming the black hat goes to pick it up). Either that or catch it and do a full-blown forensic investigation to figure out who made it.… Read more

Harry Potter would be jealous. The folks at ETH Zurich's Flying Machine Arena are making quadrocopters fly around the room with only hand gestures--no wand required.

The little four-rotor helicopter's remote control is hooked up to a Kinect Xbox controller and the controller's cameras are mounted above the user to give it a top-down view of the user's gestures.

Hold your right hand out, and the quadrocopter hovers a set distance away from you in line with your head and hand. Sweep your right hand, and the quadrocopter moves in the direction your hand's moving. Hold your left hand over your head, and the quadrocopter does a loop. Clap, and the quadrocopter lands.

It sure seems like magic; check out the video below.… Read more

The next step on the road to robo-domination is, apparently, juggling. From Switzerland's Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control comes this video of flying robots (quadrocopters) juggling a ball individually and in teams.

The quadrocopters in the video are operated by humans (for now). They do, however, have onboard computers and are able to fly themselves if properly programmed. As humanity continues to propel itself toward the inevitable robot apocalypse, it's nice to know our future machine masters will at least be able to keep us entertained.

Also, it is a pretty cool video. Check out how the quadrocopters work in the video below. … Read more

Law enforcement officials may be able to monitor crowds with low-flying cameras for more than 12 hours, thanks to what could be record-breaking laser beam-powered technology.

Two companies, Germany's Ascending Technologies and Seattle's LaserMotiv, say they set a new standard for flying time for what's called a quadrocopter, a small electric-powered helicopter.

While the concept of a camera mounted on a quadrocopter has been around for some time, the companies said in a release today that until now, law enforcement had not been able to use them for more than 20 minutes.

But Ascending Technologies and LaserMotiv … Read more

Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) may be small, but they're costly, so researchers have devised ways for them to fly in GPS-denied urban and indoor environments where they could otherwise get lost or crash.

Existing highly-precise, non-GPS navigation units are too large, heavy, and expensive to install on an MAV. But the Robust Robotics Group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory addressed this problem by developing algorithms that allow a miniature robo-quadrocopter to estimate their relative position, identify a clear path and then fly through dense air space.

"The size, weight, and budget limitations of … Read more