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.
The Hubsan H107D FPV is quite close to my ideal personal drone: small, with embedded video transmitter and camera and good flying performance.
At least some channels ar compatible with FatShark equipment, so it is possible to fly it FPV with just a pair of FatShark goggles. It is also possible to fly it FPV right from the hubsan radio, which comes with a generous screen that gets the video feed live.
Well, it’s not the Black Hornet PD-100, no GPS, no 20+ minutes flight time, video range limited to 100 meters or so according to manufacturer. However for the price (150-250$ depending on the source), it is just an amazing little personal drone. Continue reading Wide angle mod for Hubsan 4x H107D FPV – For a better FPV experience
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.”
A recent episode is raising concerns about the issue of personal drones and the protection of privacy.
As reported in this article from the Washington Times, while some protestors were manifesting outside her house, US Senator Dianne Feinstein spotted a drone, right outside her window, staring a her. We see how this must have been a terrifying experience.
“I went to the window to peek out and see who was there, and there was a drone right there at the window, looking out at me” the senator said.
For a specialized blog such as Personal Drones, it is of interest to ascertain which kind of drone was used to spy on Senator Feinstein’s privacy.
Was it a predator drone?
Or maybe an octocopter equipped with a big camera?
Continue reading Breaking news: pink drone threatening US Senator’s privacy crashes – #droneparanoia
We have recently reported about DHL’s plans on integrating multirotors in the delivery chain of some mission critical goods such as medicines, see the original post here.
The multirotors selected for the mission are the Microdrones md4-1000. Not so “micro” for the standards of this blog.
Make Magazine has published a nice, entertaining and generous article by Eric Cheng on quadcopters flown over water.
Crashes and fly aways are of course part of the story, therefore maybe when doing footage on water environments it could be worth considering a specialized solution such as a a Quad H2O?
Continue reading Tales of quadcopters and water – A nice article by Eric Cheng on Make Magazine
Bart Remes wants you to have a personal drone in the pocket. Lisa/S brings this goal closer.
At 2×2 cm and just 2 grams, Lisa/S could well be the world’s smallest autopilot, except maybe the one from the Black Hornet (on which no details are currently available).
Lisa/S was created virtually from scratch by Bart Remes, project manager of the Micro Aerial Vehicle Lab at the Aerospace Engineering Faculty of the TuDelft, and it’s team.