New Ready To Fly, unibody design bird from Walkera, the TALI H500 hexacopter.
– 3 axix GoPro gimbal
– 25 minutes flight time
– hexarotor redundancy
Read a nice full preview on the FPVGuy Blog.
I am glad to publish the following press release from Air-Vid.
Air-Vid takes off with worldwide directory of drone and UAV pilots
Continue reading Air-Vid takes off with worldwide directory of drone and UAV pilots
This had to happen sooner or later, and we’ll probably see more and more of this in the future. Spying on undressed woman, a typical activity of (some) man all over the world, now raises to a new dimension thanks for personal drones.
“In a post on Reddit describing the incident earlier this week, the woman wrote she was relaxing at the beach with her mother when she heard a whirring noise and noticed a remote-controlled aircraft nearby. She resumed napping.
The woman then noticed the drone was flying very close to female beach-goers and had a camera attached to it, according to her Reddit post. After the device hovered close to her and her mother, the woman said she located the men controlling it and approached them. She told them the device was “seriously creepy.” One responded, “It isn’t going to hurt you,” according to her Reddit post.”
Source: SFGate
The Gofor company now provides a number of personal services based on drones, that range from taking selfies to personal security. You can check the nearest Gofor drone on a map on a mobile phone app, get an ETA estimate and “rent” the drone for a particular service.
How this service will deal with current regulations in different areas such as flight permission and privacy issues, remains to be seen. All looks very easy in the promotional videos.
Continue reading Gofor: Drones on demand for a variety of tasks and services
The Senate of the state of Hawaii issued a bill for an act that would severely restricts the possibility to use drone for taking aerial pictures or video.
The main concern seems to be related to the protection of Hawaii citizens privacy. The title of the document is “Unmanned Aircrafts; Right to Privacy“. Using drones for video application would be restricted to just a few selected cases.
“Use of unmanned aircrafts prohibited. Except as provided under this part, it shall be unlawful for any law enforcement agency, state or local public agency, person, or entity to use an unmanned aircraft to gather information, including but not limited to images, photographs, or recordings.” Continue reading The Senate of the State of Hawaii issues a bill that would severely restrict drone photography and videography
According to this article on Franceinfo, a young french entrepreneur, 18 yr old Thomas Nans, is being prosecuted for “endangering other people lives” after taking an aerial video of the city of Nancy with one of his multirotors.
Here’s the video, great stuff:
Thomas Nans was called to appear in Nancy court for this accusation.
Picture this. You are trapped with your car in a long line of traffic and have no idea about how long the line is, if there is an accident ahead and how far.
Unless you have one of those:
you have no real way to escape the line. Would be great though, to be able to figure out what’s ahead. Continue reading Renault Kwid: a new concept car with embedded quadcopter
The Black Knight Transformer seems to come right out of a science fiction movie. Those scenarios of cities from the future filled with flying vehicles might be a step closer.
See the Black Knight in action in this video on youtube:
And the official press release:
EL SEGUNDO, California, 8 January 2014 – Advanced Tactics Inc., a small aerospace company, released details about its AT Transformer vehicle technology and announced that a full-scale technology demonstrator has completed its first driving tests.
Continue reading Peeking into our future – The Black Knight Transformer multirotor manned Vehicle
I have been discussing this BBC article with my friend Bo Lorenzen (check out his FPVGuy blog).
The news per se is sad but not particularly spectacular, consisting of a report of a huge blaze in an heritage village in southern Norway, known for it’s unique wooden buildings.
The interesting bit for us was a relevant presence, in the story, of drones. Specifically multirotors possibly equipped with video cameras, deployed by journalists to follow and document the event and the firefighters operations. Imagine the scene, can you visualize them, the big multirotors flying and filming over the disaster area?
According to a story published on UT San Diego, authorities in Tijuana, Mexico, are planning to buy several drones/multirotors from 3D Robotics to “monitor traffic, evaluate accident scenes, detect landslides and control wildfires”.
“The main idea is that they help with surveillance of the city,” Major Jorge Astiazarán said in an interview. “This won’t just be used for public safety, but to see how the city is growing, discover clandestine dumps … monitor any land movement in a remote area that has gone undetected.”
