Now that uDrones is a 3DR subsidiary and we've moved half of the electronics production there, uDrones is able to lower prices and provide the latest 3DR electronics. That means that the ready-to-fly ArduCopter Quad now comes…

It flew about as well as you'd expect (60-second flight time, no tolerance for wind) but what a cool bit of mechanical design! No idea how that "laser beam" control works. From …

Looks cool and costs just $72. From the Hobby King product listing:

The Target Drone is a great little FPV platform that has been specifically designed for the job…

Good news: Invensense has finally released a licence that allows open source projects such as ArduCopter/Plane to use the built-in sensor fusion processor in the MPU-6000 gyro/accel chip used in APM 2.x!

This processor, called the Digital Motion Processor (DMP), has been in the APM 2.x sensors from the…

I've given a quick tour of the big 3D Robotics factory and R&D center in San Diego before (here), but as some of you may know, we've recently opened a second manufacturing facility 30 minutes across the border, in…

Sparkfun has released its recap video of this year's great Autonomous Vehicle Competition. It was a great weekend for us, and a huge amount of fun, as you'll see. APM-powered vehicles won the air and ground category (the latter using custom-code), and the next day's Multicopter Competition, too. Really…

We were huge fans of the original EasyStar back in the day: it was tough, flew well and had loads of room for electronics. But it was slow to evolve (terrible brushed motor, no ailerons, rudder too small) and our favorite beginners platform shifted to the …

From Matt Waite's Twitter feed:

The now mostly put together Drone Journalism Lab at @Unl_CoJMC ...…

From Diginfo.tv. Those are the gnarliest motion capture dot-holders I've ever seen. Why out on sticks? A commentor says they're using a motion capture system that's just a fraction of the cost of a Vicon. Anybody know anything about that? (Maybe someone who can read Japanese and can navigate the…

We're within a day or two of releasing ArduCopter 2.6.1 to the public in the Mission Planner. It's the best performing code we've flown and the waypoint accuracy is really impressive. You can check out Marco Robustini's video above to see an long-distance waypoint flight, some tight loiter at 5:30 (holding in a 1m box!) and a fun demo of…

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Imagery from a multiwii quadcopter. Described by Forbes:

Someone going by the name Tretch5000 has posted a truly haunting FPV (First Person Video) portrait of Detroit that mixes the lush…

A new company called Rotary Robotics is planning a $100 drone, controlled by a smartphone, for aerial photography. They're planning to launch something in the $250-$300 range, with the price falling later. They call  it "Drones for Peace"…

 From IEEE Spectrum:

The reason to go with little tiny rockets for microrobots (as opposed to a more conventional propulsion system…

Just look at the complexity (and size/weight) of this mechanical gyro! Now that functionality (times nine--three gyros, three accelerometers, three magnetometers) is performed by a $15 chip smaller than your fingernail. 

From Hackaday:

When we posted our call for rocketry hacks and builds, we expected to see a few altitude sensors and maybe a GPS module or two. Apparently, we forgot similar hardware is very…

From Hackaday:

After [Pyrofer] built a quadcopter, he purchased a cheap 6-channel transmitter made in China. Unfortunately, that transmitter was terrible so he took an old PS2…

Suarez's book, Kill Decision (out next week!), is about autonomous swarms of bio-inspired drones and is terrific. If you read and loved his first book, …

Nice work on the concept here, from a French design student. 

Early sketches:…

Two-thirds of new robotics startups are in the United States, according to research by the Robot Report. 

These start-ups appear to be clustering in the Bay Area (Silicon Valley)…