Hi folks! I asked about this on a couple of other forums and IceFyre13th suggested that that a 3DR Iris+ would be a good option and that this forum would be a good place to get some more info.
To give a little background first, I work on the watson platform services team and I'm trying to put together some cool demos to show off our APIs integrated with real-world things. I was at a nodecopter event a while back where we wrote software to fly around hacked AR.Drones autonomously, and that's what sparked this idea.
What I'm thinking right now is a copter that you can tell to "go find X", and it will use the visual recognition and concept expansion services to find it. I'm envisioning it flying autonomously and possibly using the tradeoff analytics service to determine where to search next.
A halfway-decent camera (preferably pointing downwards) and an internet connection are obviously required, although I'm thinking that it could have a standalone base station (Raspberry Pi or whatever) for the internet connection - that would allow it to use voice commands without so much interference from the copter's noise.
Some other notes:
- I'm envisioning something that could work indoors, perhaps with some proximity sensors and whatnot to help it avoid running into things. But that isn't a hard requirement.
- Although I'd personally enjoy soldering things and whatnot, one of the goals here is something that's easy to reproduce - so something off the shelf or at least fairly easy to assemble would be preferred. Again, not a hard requirement.
- I'm not sure how much of a budget will get approved.. I should probably try to stay under $2k perhaps with a few different options at various prices. (This should include the GoPro or whatever as well.)
I had looked into the Iris+ already and the only real concern I had was that it might not be a good fit for indoors - - is there anything that you guys know of to make that a little easier? And, beyond that, any other advice or recommendations would also be appreciated.
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