Another Christmas/New Year's video. Enjoy!

This one was made using something like puppetry: an "actor" would hold a quadrocopter (props off) and move it. The motion would be reflected by another (flying) quadrocopter -- so you can do fun things like try to express emotions, walk around with some sort of a gait, look at things, etc.

Happy Holidays!

We played around with a Kinect as a way to more naturally interact with the quadrotors in the Flying Machine Arena and made a short video of the result. Since there is a bit of saturation of Kinect-ish videos out there, we tried to include a short explanation of how this demo works. You can find more info about the Flying Machine Arena here.

Hi all. Several of us working on the ETH Flying Machine Arena have been watching DIY Drones for a while but we've never really participated in any way. Since our work is somewhat related and might be of interest, we thought we'd post something:

So, it's been a busy year. Many new little quads as well as people joining our team. Many projects, many crashes, many improvements, probably as many new bugs :-) I'd love to give you statistics on flight hours, distance, etc, but we don't keep track of it. Like Drew Carey said on Whose Line, "the points don't matter". :-) (*whoosh* goes the reference)

For Christmas/New Years we decided to do something fun -- take a random absurd idea and see if we can make it fly -- something that people would look at and wonder "why???"... here's our shot (don't miss the ending! :-) ).

This was done on a late Friday night in about 3 hours from placing a piano in the Arena to the final shot... it's *not* a serious research project :-) (at least not yet!!). As it turns out, the keys are quite bouncy, and the quadrotor is quite light, so it was difficult to get it to hold the keys -- this is the main reason for the slowed down tempo.