Comment by Krzysztof Bosak on March 18, 2010 at 3:18am

Not exactly related but close:
I have seen a music-controlled research quadcopter at a polytechnic institute at Zurich.
It was oscillating in sync with music from typical mp3 player fed to the machine.
http://roboticcircus.blogspot.com/

Comment by Rana on March 18, 2010 at 7:27am

Nice vide Chris !
Nice videos Bosak !, amazing !

Comment by Roy Brewer on March 18, 2010 at 9:41am

I wish they had robot quadrotor projects back when I was living in that dorm...

Comment by Dimitar Kolev on March 18, 2010 at 9:44am

Thanks for the link Chris! Flight arena and quadrotor autonomous triple flips at 1300deg/s are impressive, other project are very interesting, too.

Comment by Jack Crossfire on March 18, 2010 at 10:23am

Sort of going out of his way to get iPhone points. Shouldn't there be a microphone on the aircraft with him talking to the aircraft?

Comment by Mike on March 18, 2010 at 12:16pm

Not that impressive really. Just connecting two technologies and the end result is a lot of latency when compared with a joystick/tx or even keyboard. For what they are aiming for maybe that is ok though...

Comment by Dave Glidden on March 18, 2010 at 12:38pm

"fly to the kitchen and bring me a sandwich"

Comment by passunca on March 18, 2010 at 3:25pm

Very nice... It looks to me like a very nice combination of several different technologies like voice recognition, natural language processing, navigation in 3d environment, indoor positioning and autonomous flight. The commands given to the machine are simple navigation commands, like goto to known location, or relative movements. The flight plan is "basically" a sequential processing of those multiple commands.

So i would say it works like this:
-The speech recognition translates the voice input into text.
-the natural language processing system translates the text into a flight plan.
-the 3d navigation system defines the optimal path
- the quad starts to execute the flight plan, adjustments are made to the flight plan to avoid moving obstacles like people until the drone reaches its targeted location.

easy, right? no not at all... great work!

Comment by Ravi Gaddipati on March 20, 2010 at 10:52am

I think a premade voice processor was used. You can see the iphone showing the text, so it seems it does all the processing a transmits it to the copter.

How do they do the map thing in the lower right corner?

Comment by Roy Brewer on March 20, 2010 at 2:24pm

Here's a tech paper on it http://tkollar.csail.mit.edu/TK/Publications/kollar10.pdf

Although this level of sophistication is probably too much for the typical hobbyist, I'll bet it wouldn't be that difficult to get a groundstation to interpret much simpler commands (e.g. "left", stop" "climb" etc) to command a telemetry equipped UAV

- Roy

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