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  • Can't wait to get one of these if that's the price!

    Here's a CES video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPnh95fJLIE
  • Official release "date" is 2010. Most likely before summer (march?). Reportedly the unit cost will be under $500.
  • Folks,
    If you look at the fine print from ARDrones, you'll see that $1200 gets you a loan of the quadricopter, not a sale. They also likely won't let you just play around with this device...seems they are dead set on getting people to somehow use the quadricopter in game development. If you look at their license [on the ARDrones site], you will see that they seem pretty adament that this is for game development and nothing else. If you rummage around their site, they 'mention' selling the quadricopter, but I couldn't find any further data on how to buy it.
  • Jack, don't forget the Paparazzi is French too. The iphone bit is a gimmik but a great one. It actually is not that bad a controller. Re battery time, I read that the aussi quad copter has a longer battery life (for $60,000 it would want to), but they also feel that the ability to land for a while, have a look and then hop to a new location is a more reasonable use of quads , than flying high or far. Fixed wing are better for that .

    What I like about this AR DRone is that it is using a downward facing camera for stabilisation. I have had a play with Open CV today to see if it is feasabile and I reckon it is. There are loads of feature tracking functions that output an array of points. This array and subsequent ones can be interpreted to determine motion or lack of it. I have quite a few small linux boards here, so I am going to see whether they can process the data quickly enough for RT stabilisation and assisted control without too much power draw. Mostly they draw between 3 and 5 watts .

    Wurpfel,
    I messed around the the (I think) agilent sensors a few years back but never thought to put a different lens on the sensor and see if it could determine motion at longer range. Worth a look but I think the resolution was only 16 *16 pixels
  • hi folkz

    optic flow sensors are inside on PCmices, you have only to change the lens and ad a laserpointer for lighting the scene. works great, the mouseIC spit out XY deplacement, speed and acceleration.
    when put to looks forward it avoid obstacles like a fly.

    test it, its also arduino-compatible ;) and VERY funny on blimpduino or coax-choppers!


    cheat:
    a pinhole works nice as lense
  • automatik, I wouldn't be surprised if it were using the AR Toolkit (opensource augmented reality system) to do the reality augmentation. From the released videos it looks like it's using a very simple marker tracker to find the position (not orientation) of the marker and overlay it using opengl. Nothing new :)

    What I really like about the Parrot drone is the optical flow sensor. This video really caught my attention. The position hold accuracy is amazing.
  • Moderator
    Its the first decent ad that I have seen for this sort of gear, smacks of the Dragon stuff, all hype though. Its flying on a flat calm day! Cool idea.
  • This begs to become open source :)
  • Impressive amount of features for a country which gives 6 weeks vacation time.

    Not sure looking at an iPhone screen to play games while something is flying around somewhere else is going to sell all that flight hardware. If it has to be viewed on the phone, battery capacity of the flying thing will definitely limit play time needlessly. The idea with augmented reality is to enhance real locations without placing markers. You're supposed to be able to fly it to 400ft & see advertizements superimposed on real locations. Corporate marketing.
  • Developer
    Ok meeting next week @ Chris house, bring your AR.drones.
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