Blogs

This is "25-year-old Tim Pool — an internationally known journalist who attracts tens of thousands of viewers to his live-stream broadcasts from Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, DC, LA and other cities. (His feeds and archival footage are also aired on mainstream networks such as NBC.)", according to this Wired profile. He's taking his video documenting of protests to the skies with a series of customized mulitorotor UAVs he calls "Occucopters".

He started with a modified AR.Drone, but is now moving to platforms that will perform better outside, and that's taken them to APM and ArduCopter:

All their plans for zeppelins and steadycam choppers go well beyond what a toy copter can do. But Pool and Shapiro have been surprised to find many other options.

At the high end is Polish company RoboKopter. Its stunning video of clashing demonstrators in Warsaw in November prompted the New York Times to proclaim “Drone Journalism Arrives.” Shaprio hasn’t gotten pricing from them, but he priced out a similar craft from a company called Draganfly and got a quote close to $30,000.

Pool and Shapiro are instead going with a product called ArduPilot made by DIY Drones. It’s based on the Arduino board – microcontroller that’s a mainstay for robot builders. ArduPilot is a version equipped specifically to control aircraft. They will have to modify the open-source software to support their camera-operator maneuvers.