Amazon is finally starting to address some of the actual challenges with drone delivery, making us slightly less skeptical

Amazon has been working away at its Prime Air urban and suburban drone delivery for years. Many years. It’s been at least half a decade now. And for the entire time, we’ve been complaining that Amazon has been focusing on how to build drones that can physically transport objects rather than how to build drones that can safely and reliably transport objects in a manner that makes economic sense and that people actually want.

At its re:MARS conference today, Amazon showed off a brand-new version of its Prime Air drone. The design is certainly unique, featuring a hybrid tailsitter design with 6 degrees of freedom, but people have been futzing with weird drone designs for a long time, and this may or may not be a.) what Amazon has actually settled on long-term or b.) the best way of doing things, versus other techniques like Google Wing’s dangly box. 

What’s much more exciting is that Amazon seems to now be addressing the issue of safety, and has added a comprehensive suite of on-board sensing and computing that will help the drone deal with many of the complex obstacles that it’s likely to encounter while doing its job.

We should point out right away that Amazon’s pleasant piano music means that you cannot hear what this drone sounds like in flight, and noise is turning out to be one of the biggest problems with urban and suburban delivery drones, as Google Wing has discovered in Australia. Amazon seems to be taking the same “oh people will just get used to it” approach as Google is, and for better or worse that’s probably what’s going to end up happening. Sigh.

The really cool bit about today’s announcement is the addition of sense and avoid to Amazon’s drones, which Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s chief executive for worldwide consumer, detailed in a blog post:

Our drones need to be able to identify static and moving objects coming from any direction. We employ diverse sensors and advanced algorithms, such as multi-view stereo vision, to detect static objects like a chimney. To detect moving objects, like a paraglider or helicopter, we use proprietary computer-vision and machine learning algorithms.

For the drone to descend for delivery, we need a small area around the delivery location that is clear of people, animals, or obstacles. We determine this using explainable stereo vision in parallel with sophisticated AI algorithms trained to detect people and animals from above.

A customer’s yard may have clotheslines, telephone wires, or electrical wires. Wire detection is one of the hardest challenges for low-altitude flights. Through the use of computer-vision techniques we’ve invented, our drones can recognize and avoid wires as they descend into, and ascend out of, a customer’s yard.

This is a good start, although I would push back a little bit on the assertion that Wilke ends with that “our drones are safe.” This technology certainly has the potential to make Amazon’s drones much safer than they were before, but my guess is that statements like “our drones can recognize and avoid wires” would probably be more accurately written as “our drones have the ability to recognize and avoid wires most of the time when conditions are favorable.”

Whether the sensors are effective at low sun angles, when there’s lots of glare after it rains, or in particularly challenging situations like trying to detect black wires against black asphalt from above is unclear. It’s awesome that Amazon is tackling all of this stuff head-on, but it’s important to be very careful not to take these “we’ve solved it” statements at face value until Amazon has shown exactly what their drone can do, which as far as we know they have not.

And even with all this progress, I can’t help but come back to the fundamental question of whether this kind of drone delivery is actually worth it. I love robots, and I’m having a very hard time thinking of this as anything more than a novelty, especially considering the growth of both autonomous vehicles and sidewalk robots (which Amazon is also working on). Amazon brings up the environmental impact of delivery as another argument in favor of drones, suggesting that “an electric drone, charged using sustainable means, traveling to drop off a package is a vast improvement over a car on the road.” Likely true, as long as the car is delivering just one package—I’m not sure how the numbers work out if you’re comparing drones to a loaded delivery van, though. And again, noise pollution needs to be considered, too.

Delivery drones are the right answer, I think, in some cases. Medical supply delivery is one. Rural delivery is another. It’s less clear whether suburban delivery really fills a long-term need, or whether companies like Amazon and Google are mostly just doing it because they can. But either way, it’s great to see Amazon acknowledging these hard problems, and we’re looking forward to seeing some of their technologies, like obstacle avoidance, in action, which Amazon says could happen within months.

SOURCE: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/amazon-redesigned-prime-air-drone

Interested in a adding optical zooming to your DIY UAV systems? It is now possible to build a field tested zoom gimbal by yourself. Vertigo DIY kit gives you an opportunity to enter the specific fields of drone services such as emergency, surveillance, monitoring, agriculture or computer vision development. 

We prepared 3 buying options: Full kit + .STL’s files, Electronics kit, and .STL files only.

This is the best price solution on the market right now, and it will bring you most of the functionality that is brought by professional UAV systems on the market in any drone capable of lifting 398g | 0.87 lbs of payload, and it will work fine in most diy multirotors and some larger airplane frames.

If you have an access to 3D printer you will be able to produce several pieces for yourself, and start some larger scaled missions quite fast. 

We are excited to see what upgrades are introduced in your versions of the gimbal, so please share your builds with us. We hope it will help to develop better solutions in future for all of us in DIY community.

We recorded a full assembly tutorial, so the build should go very smooth. If you need more assistance please feel free to contact us directly (via contact@vertigofpv.com) as well.

First 4 sets sold to diydrones.com users will also include parts already printed for your convenience.  

Hope you will have a great time building your own zoom gimbal. 

More information:

http://vertigofpv.com/index.php/vertigo-27x-v1-3-axis-stabilised-uav-zoom-gimbal-diy-kit/

Cheers!

http://vertigofpv.com

What is Battery-Free HD Video Streaming?

Robots that Learn

We’ve created a robotics system, trained entirely in simulation and deployed on a physical robot, which can learn a new task after seeing it done once.

Check out the video!

Algorithms

Last month, we showed an earlier version of this robot where we’d trained its vision system using domain randomization, that is, by showing it simulated objects with a variety of color, backgrounds, and textures, without the use of any real images.

Now, we’ve developed and deployed a new algorithm, one-shot imitation learning, allowing a human to communicate how to do a new task by performing it in VR. Given a single demonstration, the robot is able to solve the same task from an arbitrary starting configuration. 

---

General procedure

Caption: Our system can learn a behavior from a single demonstration delivered within a simulator, then reproduce that behavior in different setups in reality.

The system is powered by two neural networks: a vision network and an imitation network.

The vision network ingests an image from the robot’s camera and outputs state representing the positions of the objects. As before, the vision network is trained with hundreds of thousands of simulated images with different perturbations of lighting, textures, and objects. (The vision system is never trained on a real image.)

The imitation network observes a demonstration, processes it to infer the intent of the task, and then accomplishes the intent starting from another starting configuration. Thus, the imitation network must generalize the demonstration to a new setting. But how does the imitation network know how to generalize?

The network learns this from the distribution of training examples. It is trained on dozens of different tasks with thousands of demonstrations for each task. Each training example is a pair of demonstrations that perform the same task. The network is given the entirety of the first demonstration and a single observation from the second demonstration. We then use supervised learning to predict what action the demonstrator took at that observation. In order to predict the action effectively, the robot must learn how to infer the relevant portion of the task from the first demonstration.

Applied to block stacking, the training data consists of pairs of trajectories that stack blocks into a matching set of towers in the same order, but start from different start states. In this way, the imitation network learns to match the demonstrator’s ordering of blocks and size of towers without worrying about the relative location of the towers.

---

Block stacking

The task of creating color-coded stacks of blocks is simple enough that we were able to solve it with a scripted policy in simulation. We used the scripted policy to generate the training data for the imitation network. At test time, the imitation network was able to parse demonstrations produced by a human, even though it had never seen messy human data before.

The imitation network uses soft attention over the demonstration trajectory and the state vector which represents the locations of the blocks, allowing the system to work with demonstrations of variable length. It also performs attention over the locations of the different blocks, allowing it to imitate longer trajectories than it’s ever seen, and stack blocks into a configuration that has more blocks than any demonstration in its training data.

For the imitation network to learn a robust policy, we had to inject a modest amount of noise into the outputs of the scripted policy. This forced the scripted policy to demonstrate how to recover when things go wrong, which taught the imitation network to deal with the disturbances from an imperfect policy. Without injecting the noise, the policy learned by the imitation network would usually fail to complete the stacking task.

source: https://blog.openai.com/robots-that-learn/

In Guyana, where forests cover over 80 percent of the country, the threat of illegal logging is ever present. A lot of the time, it’s hard to even know if it’s happening. That’s in part because the country’s population is so small, just 735,000 people to keep watch on 83,000 square miles of country. 

But around 9,000 of those residents are Wapichan, an indigenous community living the country’s southern region, where forests are repeatedly threatened. Wapichan community members had long sought ways to fight the loggers, who were threatening their homes, but, according to Quartz, found it hard to persuade the government to intervene, in part because they couldn’t always prove illegal logging was happening. 

That’s where drones come in. Or, specifically, one drone, a fixed-wing model that tribe members built, incredibly, by watching DIY videos on YouTube. A camera mounted on the drone captures images of the logging, evidence the Wapichan community can then take to the Guyanese government. 

The drone has now been documenting the forests for months, and the Wapichan’s struggle with combating the loggers continues. According to Quartz, they are optimistic that the country’s new president, elected last year, will work with them. 

“We are the guardians of the forest,” Nicolas Fredericks, a Wapichan leader, told Quartz. “We will not stand for [its] destruction in the name of development.”

link: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-a-tribe-is-fighting-off-loggers-with-a-drone-they-built-watching-youtube

Merry Christmas to the hole Diydrones community by the way! :D

Cheers Greg

Hi Guys!

I have an uplifting video for you today! :) Look at that brave drone pilot catching this nasty forrest polluter, near the capitol of Poland.

Disturbed and frightened by this new amazing technology ;), polluter rushes to pick up his garbage, puts it back on his car and drives away. Actually, he probably is afraid that the hole event is recorded, but he surely is amazed by the technology that invaded his once peaceful day. IMHO this video is an amazing presentation of the possibilities brought by drones.

Did you enjoy, this movie as much as i did? Hope so! Cheers! :D

Hi diydroners!

After a few months filled with hours of work we came up with the new version of affordable drone zoom gimbal solution for all diy users. We call it simply Vertigo V.2. 

We listened to your feedback, which helped us in the biggest way possible, that is why there are lots of improvements laying underneath the new edition.

The V.2:

-We had a lot of emails with questions about different types of camera inside the gimbal. That is why V.2 is capable of containing several camera cores such as: 27X SD, 36X SD, 30X HD, 18X HD with video recording functionality, and 10X(with recording) + Thermal camera core, and more.

-We also made a gimbal version with increased yaw motor size which brings even more stability to the video than before. Now with the new aerodynamic design the gimbal is suitable to work on bigger aircrafts with cruise speed up to 60mph.

-The new construction and new material allows us to operate in high temperatures for as log as 8 hours with stable functionality all the time. 

-The gimbal controller is now 32 bit board rather than 8 bit. 

-We managed to upgrade the sensor so there is no I2C connection to IMU anymore, and the data is stable and reliable all the time! 

-Overall, the gimbal runs smoother and the electronics are more reliable. 

-All gimbal axis have physical end stops, for ease of use.

-We introduced first version of V.2 30X HD with digital image stabilisation

-We also introduced customisation service, that allows us to deliver better solutions for your projects 

Vertigo V.2

We are making progress everyday, and we should soon be ready with new products. Here is a tiny sneakpeak:

Digital stabilisation test:

New lightweight 10x HD gimbal:

Thank you for you support:

We also want to thank you for last months together. We had the privilege to get in contact with you, and to learn about many of your incredible drone projects made all around the world.

Here are some of our memories from last months that we want to share with you, enjoy!:

- Our dear friend Tito with his awesome drones armada equipped with Vertigo 27X:

- Polish Airforce Institute Of Technology useing a custom Vertigo in their Atrax drone:

- RC Kozofsky, flying on a simple flame wheel frame and Vertigo 27X, a low budget system with great effects.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=halNRIyMhds)

One more thing:

As we announced before, everyone that bought V27x is getting a discount on V.2, so if thats the case just email us (contact@vertigofpv.com) before the purchase and you will receive a discount code 150$. If you bought more than one unit from us please contacts us for special, even better offer.

We are looking for partnership and distribution right now, if you are interested please contact us we will be glad to make new business opportunities! 

As always, you can find our products on vertigofpv.com

Best To You!

Greg - VertigoFPV 

Hi guys,

i just came across this reddit post which claims that 3DR Solo is now available at Best Buy and Amazon for $399.

It all looks valid, but the price seems tobr to good to be true for me. 

Take a look at this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/drones/comments/55i6he/3dr_solo_drone_price_dropped_to_399/

Is this even possble? :)

I wonder how many customers will resign from DJI P4/Mavic for 3DR Solo, if this price will remain. I have 6 copters my self, but for $399 i am getting one more for sure.

Best Buy:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/3dr-solo-drone-black/5351035.p

Amazon:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/3dr-solo-drone-black/5351035.p

With this type of prices the sky will be full of robots soon! ;)

Cheers!

Hi,

i recently came across a video of stocking fish with the use of an airplane. Immediately i thought of our dear community. Is it just me or you too think you can do it more effectively with the use of drones? I am not a marine biologist, but from the video above it looks like half of the fish died in this attempt, don't you think? Some guys from YT agree ;)

Anyway, what do you think? Let's say this is a hard to reach terrain, situated few miles from starting point. It would be a medium difficulty challenge to provide a platform for this task, wouldn't it?

Cheers!

In anticipation of the event, the establishment of a governing body - the World Organization for Racing Drones - was also formally announced.

Dubai will host the first 'World Drone Prix' in March, which organisers say will be the world's biggest drone race, with a grand prize of $1 million.

Speaking at the last day of the World Air Games at Skydive Dubai's Palm drop zone, Minister of Cabinet Affairs Mohammed Abdullah Al Gergawi said that the upcoming Drone Prix represents the future of air racing and drone technology.

"In Dubai, we believe that every end is the beginning of a new journey, and our journey towards being in the future starts today," he said.

"The World Drone Prix is the future of racing, pushing the boundary of drone technology until it becomes the reality of transport in the future."

"Since the beginning of time, man has raced by running, horseback, car and plane," Al Gergawi added.

"The World Drone Prix will be the biggest race of its kind, with a grand prize of $1 million."

The Drone Prix will be held under the direction of Shaikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai.

In anticipation of the event, the establishment of a governing body, the World Organisation for Racing Drones, was also formally announced.

"The organisation will govern the standard of the drone racing industry, and establish the code that will be the standard for races in the future," Al Gergawi added.

"Dubai is no longer a city that dreams of the future. It is a city from the future and with the World Drone Prix will inspire the technology of the future."

In addition to organising the March competition and setting rules and regulations, the organisation will also be charged with awarding future host cities the race, accrediting pilots and other organisations, and spreading awareness of potential uses of drone technology.

On December 20, the World Organisation for Racing Drones will release a code of conduct and rules and regulations for the event.

Qualifying events, which will be held at various locations on every continent, will begin on January 1, 2016. To qualify, teams must place in first, second or third positions in qualifying races of 15 or more teams.

Teams that qualify for the competition will be flown into Dubai in early March to take part in a practice run on March 9.

The opening day of the event will be held on the evening of March 10, with the main event - which includes freestyle and track races - taking place on March 11th.

Prizes will be awarded in several other categories, such as best manufacturer.

Event organisers noted that the Drone Prix's $1 million grand prize dwarfs that of other drones races that are currently being held.

The October 17-22, 2016 World Drone Racing Championship in Hawaii, for example, will give $200,000 in cash, prizes and trophies to winners across multiple categories.

To participate in the Drone Prix, teams must have at least five members, including a pilot, a navigator, someone in charge of the pit-stop, a pit-stop technician, and a team leader.

All teams must have at least one sponsor.

All drones that take part in the competition will have similar batteries and air frames to ensure competitive races, and must be operated by team members using remote control, rather than autonomously on pre-programmed routes.

The World Grand Prix will mark the second major drone competition hosted by Dubai in 2016.

In February, the winners of the second UAE Drones For Good Awards, which has attracted 1,107 participants from 165 countries, will be announced at a special ceremony prior to the Fourth Government Summit.

Drone Prix terms

> Qualifying events at various locations will begin on January 1, 2016

> Teams that qualify will be flown to Dubai in early March

> Each team must have at least 5 members, including a pilot, a navigator, someone in charge of the pit-stop, a pit-stop technician and a team leader

How Elon Musk and Y Combinator Plan to Stop Computers From Taking Over

They’re funding a new organization, OpenAI, to pursue the most advanced forms of artificial intelligence — and give the results to the public

Asif the field of AI wasn’t competitive enough — with giants like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and even car companies like Toyota scrambling to hire researchers — there’s now a new entry, with a twist. It’s a non-profit venture called OpenAI, announced today, that vows to make its results public and its patents royalty-free, all to ensure that the scary prospect of computers surpassing human intelligence may not be the dystopia that some people fear. Funding comes from a group of tech luminaries including Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Jessica Livingston and Amazon Web Services. They have collectively pledged more than a billion dollars to be paid over a long time period. The co-chairs are Musk and Sam Altman, the CEO of Y Combinator, whose research group is also a funder. (As is Altman himself.)

Musk, a well-known critic of AI, isn’t a surprise. But Y Combinator? Yep. That’s the tech accelerator that started 10 years ago as a summer project that funded six startup companies by paying founders “ramen wages” and giving them gourmet advice so they could quickly ramp up their businesses. Since then, YC has helped launch almost 1,000 companies, including Dropbox, Airbnb, and Stripe, and has recently started a research division. For the past two years, it’s been led by Altman, whose company Loopt was in the initial class of 2005, and sold in 2012 for $43.4 million. Though YC and Altman are funders, and Altman is co-chair, OpenAI is a separate, independent venture.

Essentially, OpenAI is a research lab meant to counteract large corporations who may gain too much power by owning super-intelligence systems devoted to profits, as well as governments which may use AI to gain power and even oppress their citizenry. It may sound quixotic, but the team has already scored some marquee hires, including former Stripe CTO Greg Brockman (who will be OpenAI’s CTO) and world-class researcher Ilya Sutskever, who was formerly at Google and was one of the famed group of young scientists studying under neural net pioneer Geoff Hinton in Toronto. He’ll be OpenAI’s research director. The rest of the lineup includes top young talent whose resumes include major academic groups, Facebook AI and DeepMind, the AI company Google snapped up in 2014. There is also a stellar board of advisors including Alan Kay, a pioneering computer scientist.

OpenAI’s leaders spoke to me about the project and its aspirations. The interviews were conducted in two parts, first with Altman and then another session with Altman, Musk, and Brockman. I combined the interviews and edited for space and clarity.

How did this come about?

Sam Altman: We launched YC Research about a month and a half ago, but I had been thinking about AI for a long time and so had Elon. If you think about the things that are most important to the future of the world, I think good AI is probably one of the highest things on that list. So we are creating OpenAI. The organization is trying to develop a human positive AI. And because it’s a non-profit, it will be freely owned by the world.

Elon Musk: As you know, I’ve had some concerns about AI for some time. And I’ve had many conversations with Sam and with Reid [Hoffman], Peter Thiel, and others. And we were just thinking, “Is there some way to insure, or increase, the probability that AI would develop in a beneficial way?” And as a result of a number of conversations, we came to the conclusion that having a 501c3, a non-profit, with no obligation to maximize profitability, would probably be a good thing to do. And also we’re going to be very focused on safety.

And then philosophically there’s an important element here: we want AI to be widespread. There’s two schools of thought — do you want many AIs, or a small number of AIs? We think probably many is good. And to the degree that you can tie it to an extension of individual human will, that is also good.

source: https://medium.com/backchannel/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinator-plan-to-stop-computers-from-taking-over-17e0e27dd02a#.z1lxrlsdk

project site: https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/

Amazon delivered a lovely update on its ‘Prime Air’ project today — almost exactly two years after it showed the first iteration of its drone. You know, the flying delivery dronethat some thought was a massive joke meant for April 1st. Included are some high-res shots and two new videos.The video, moderated by ex-Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson (who is now working on a new series for Amazon), talks about the design and your experience as a recipient:

As you can see, Amazon has now moved to a hybrid design. It looks much bigger than in previous renderings. Imagine that thing flying towards the neighbor’s house. Get ready for reports of aliens rising if this thing ever comes to fruition.

The new Prime Air drone isn’t just a quadcopter anymore. It still takes off and lands vertically, but then it switches to a regular horizontal flight mode, which is far more efficient. It’s basically part helicopter, part airplane. With this new design, the drone can cover over 15 miles and fly over 55 mph, Amazon says. In the video, Clarkson says Amazon is working on a family of drones for different environments and purposes.

The new drones feature at least some degree of sense-and-avoid technology and once it arrives at its intended location, it’ll scan the area and look for a landing spot. Right now, it looks like users will be able to mark this spot in their yard, for example, with an Amazon logo. The drone then lands, drops off the package and takes off again.

“This design enables it to fly long distances efficiently and go straight up and down in a safe, agile way. It is one of many prototype vehicles we have developed,” an Amazon spokesperson told us. “One day, seeing Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road.”

Obviously, Amazon still has a few hurdles to climb, even with this new design. Chances are, we won’t see these new drones deliver packages in a city anytime soon. The new design, however, should work really well in a more rural and suburban area (and yes, feel free to leave us a comment about how you would shoot it down if it flew over your house).

If Amazon can solve some of the harder sense-and-avoid issues (like small power lines), then maybe Prime Air will take off sooner than many of use expected (assuming Amazon manages to work within the FAA’s upcoming regulations for commercial drones).

source & more: http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/29/amazon-shows-off-new-prime-air-drone-with-hybrid-design/?ncid=pushup

GoPro’s been working on this camera thing for a while now, so you’d expect anything it makes to capture great footage. This video is still impressive. GoPro’s launching a drone in the first half of next year, and released a two-minute video captured with a prototype. “The footage has not been stabilized in post-production,” the video says, and if that’s true GoPro’s got a winner on its hands.

The color and dynamic range aren’t the point—the footage is shot on the Hero 4, which you can already buy. What’s amazing is the perfect, almost dolly-like stability of the shots of an idyllic farm and a journey through the forest. The sleepy guitar music, though, has nothing to do with the drone. It’s just nice.

source: http://www.wired.com/2015/10/gopros-unreleased-drone-already-shoots-great-video/

Not much info yet but at least we know the launch date:

Woodman also revealed the company is working on a quadcopter — or drone, as they’re more commonly known. He declined to share any details about its design and pricing, but it’s slated to launch in the first half of 2016 and will be aimed at consumers. 

“It’s incredible to see our world from new perspectives. It’s a real ‘Oh my God’ moment,” said Woodman. “We did that with our GoPro cameras, and we see a similar opportunity in the quadcopter market. It’s something that’s in our DNA, and we are excited about it across the company.”

Though it’s working on its own hardware, GoPro plans to continue working with other drone manufacturers to provide cameras and software solutions for aerial video and photography.

“We recognize that consumers want choice,” said Woodman. “Our primary focus is enabling great content, and however they want to do that, we’re excited to be part of that.”

Woodman also announced virtual reality accessory:

The first is the Six-Camera Spherical Array. The ball-shaped accessory mount can accommodate six Hero4 cameras positioned in different directions to capture high-resolution images and video for virtual reality. The recorded video and pictures can then be stitched together using Kolor, the virtual reality software company GoPro acquired in April, to create one unified 6K spherical image.

The resulting video can be viewed on VR headsets like Oculus, Google Cardboard and Microsoft HoloLens. It can also be viewed on your smartphone or PC using the Kolor app or YouTube 360. If viewing on a mobile device, you can physically turn around to look in any direction — up, down, left, right. On your computer’s browser, you can use your cursor to get different views. Here’s an example video GoPro shot for the Code Conference.

more:

http://recode.net/2015/05/27/gopros-next-adventure-virtual-reality-drones/

A drone start-up is going to counter industrial scale deforestation using industrial scale reforestation.

BioCarbon Engineering wants to use drones for good, using the technology to seed up to one billion trees a year, all without having to set foot on the ground.

26 billion trees are currently being burned down every year while only 15 billion are replanted. If successful, the initiative could help address this shortfall in a big way.

Drones should streamline reforestation considerably, with hand-planting being slow and expensive.

"The only way we're going to take on these age-old problems is with techniques that weren't available to us before," CEO and former Nasa-engineer Lauren Fletcher said. "By using this approach we can meet the scale of the problem out there."

BioCarbon's system for planting is really quite sophisticated, and should provide better uptake than traditional dry seeding by air.

First, drones flies above an area and report on its potential for restoration, then they descend to two or three metres above ground and fire out pods containing seeds that are pre-germinated and covered in a nutritious hydrogel.

Fletcher doesn't pretend that the method is as good as hand-sowing, but it's a hell of a lot quicker.

With two operators manning multiple drones, he thinks it should be possible to plant up to 36,000 trees a day, and at around 15% of the cost of traditional methods.

A prototype for the system impressed at the Drones for Good competition in the United Arab Emirates, and the company hopes to have fully-working versions by the end of the summer.

The Federal Aviation Administration has been rather stingy when it comes to giving companies the OK to test, let alone employ, drones. After getting permission this week, AIG joins State Farm and USAA as insurance providers with exemptions that allow them to use the UAVs to perform tasks that are risky to regular folks -- things like roof inspections after a major storm. In addition to keeping its inspectors safe, the company says drones will speed up the claims process, which means its customers will, in theory, get paid faster. "UAVs can help accelerate surveys of disaster areas with high resolution images for faster claims handling, risk assessment, and payments," the news release explains. "They can also quickly and safely reach areas that could be dangerous or inaccessible for manual inspection, and they provide richer information about properties, structures, and claim events."

The FAA's exemption also allows AIG to expand its drone research here in the States, after previous flight tests were conducted in New Zealand. For the UAVs to really become useful in these scenarios, the government will have to ease restrictions -- specifically the requirement that the pilot keep the vehicle in sight. If you'll recall, the FAA recently granted Amazon permission to conduct tests and is working with CNN on research for media use. While the current rules may be prohibitive, it's clear that the Administration is willing to update its regulations as the technology becomes even more pervasive.

[Image credit: George Rose/Getty Images]

source: 

http://www.engadget.com/2015/04/09/aig-faa-approval-insurance-drones/

more: 

http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/9/8377035/aig-drones-uav-faa-replace-inspectors

http://www.aig.com/press-releases_3171_438003.html

From an account on Twitter we found a post about a fire on a plane because of a drone! Wait, what? So it appears a DJI Inspire 1 caught fire in the overhead compartment, we do not know the cause of the fire but looks like a moderate one. Glad it happened on the ground and not the air! The attendants quickly put out the fire and removed the craft and its owner!

source:

http://dronefriend.com/2015/03/16/dji-inspire-1-catches-fire-on-passanger-plane/#

Inspired by that wonderful scene in Return of the Jedi where Luke and Leia race through the trees of Endor using speeder bikes, there's a small group of enthusiasts who do the same thing using camera-equipped remote control drones. Like Adam Woodworth who decided to take his hobby one step further by building a quadcopter that looks exactly like a stormtrooper riding a speeder bike.

source & more:

http://toyland.gizmodo.com/a-star-wars-speeder-bike-quadcopter-looks-perfect-racin-1691311767

more details:

http://makezine.com/projects/fpv-star-wars-speeder-bike-quadcopter-puts-you-in-the-drivers-seat/

Hi there,

First of all thank you for your feedback, we are truly excited to get so many warm comments and smart suggestions from all of you.

For all of you who see this project for the first time, check out earlier post to get some info ( http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/fpv-gimbal-for-zoom-camera?xg_source=activity , http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/fpv-gimbal-for-zoom-camera-first-week-of-tests )

Order site: http://vertigofpv.com (choose "Choose Kit" or "Order" button and then "Add to cart" under the desired kit to get to PayPal checkout. You can also choose "Store" from the upper menu)

Please remember to fill in the delivery address in the PayPal checkout step.
The delivery date is set to 01 of May 2015, but in practice we should be ready 2 weeks earlier.

If you need an invoice, please send us the necessary info by email (vertigofpv@gmail.com), after making the payment with PayPal.

Feel free to ask anything about the product at all time.

Cheers,

Greg Dronsky

Hi guys, 

First i'd like to thank all of you for your comments regarding our first post (http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/fpv-gimbal-for-zoom-camera?xg_source=activity). Your comments helped us with technical issues and got us really positively motivated. 

Theory became reality

We have just finished the first week of tests and we are more than happy to share our results with you. We are now flying FPV with 3 axis gimbal with a 27x zoom, so lightweight, that it can be easily attached to Iris+ or Phantom, or a SkySurfer1400 plane. And the experience is amazing. It is very natural to fly with the zoom and it gives you a lot of freedom. It really feels, that this is a must have feature in all FPV models.

More work to come

The gimbal gives some minor vibrations when the camera is at full zoom, but we plan to improve it until we get the maximum quality. We still see room for improvement, and it's only our first week of tuning :).

When we hit the maximum level of mechanical stabilisation we plan to test a digital camera with zoom, with a software stabilisation. The quality of video can improve dramatically by replacing camera to a better one.

Some specs:

-27x zoom (3,5mm - 94,5mm)
-PWM zoom control (from receiver)
-1/3'' SONY 960H EXview HAD CCD II (700TVL)
-RTF weight 360 grams /0.79 lbs (including camera, autofocus lens, brushless motors, a dedicated dampening plate and gimbal controller)
-3S Voltage input.

Jacob and I thought about building few sets for you to test. If you're interested just email us (vertigofpv@gmail.com).