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Fleye - Your personal flying robot - Now on Kickstarter

Posted by Laurent Eschenauer on December 3, 2015 at 5:56am

Hello everyone,

Over the past six months I’ve shared with you the progress of our ‘flying ball’ project Fleye. So I imagine you’ll be interested to know that we are now live on Kickstarter. The video tells our story and the page explains in more details the technical specifications.

In addition to the form factor,  Fleye is also interesting on the computing performance side. We have a hybrid autopilot, using a cortex M4 for time sensitive control systems and a ARM A9 on board Linux computer to run custom drone applications. We will provide an API and SDK enabling developers to write custom application running directly on the drone.

Our platform is based on an iMX6, which has a GPU supporting OpenGL/OpenCL, and we support OpenCV, the popular computer vision library. This means that you can write applications that leverage the video feed to take actions, such as color/tag detection/tracking, face detection, etc.

Fleye is thus quite different than a classic RC controlled drone. We prefer to call it a ‘flying robot’ since it opens many possibilities to experiment safely with a fully autonomous flying platform.

 

What do you think? I would love to get your feedback and I remain of course available to answer your questions.

 

For the Fleye team,

 

Laurent

 

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Comments

  • Laurent Eschenauer December 3, 2015 at 10:26am

    Thanks all for the encouraging feedback !

    @killerovsky

    There have been many designs posted in the past here, I assume some of them are based on arducopter, multiwii, etc. In our case this is a 100% inhouse control, written with a model-based-design approach, with automated code generation. As for aerodynamics, we are well aware of Will thesis which is an excellent read indeed. We spent a lot of time on the lip design, both experimentally and using CFD. Happy to share more insight if questions!

  • killerovsky December 3, 2015 at 10:04am

    @Rob_Lefebvre Hmm, but how this frame type is named in the ArduCopter?

  • Damian December 3, 2015 at 9:57am

    5min and 10lines of code with Multiwii/CleanFlight

  • Rob_Lefebvre December 3, 2015 at 9:56am

    kellerovsky, we already have support for these vehicle types. Not sure how well it works, but it's there.

  • killerovsky December 3, 2015 at 9:47am

    Theory: Effects of Duct Lip Shaping and Various Control Devices on the Hove...

  • killerovsky December 3, 2015 at 9:45am

    BTW how hard is to add/support such copter type (single ducted fan with 4 control vanes) in ArduCopter?

  • Damian December 3, 2015 at 9:44am

    1200 euros .... hmm ....

  • Anderl December 3, 2015 at 9:39am
    Nice and clean design. Congrats and good luck.
  • Nikola Rabchevsky December 3, 2015 at 7:28am

    So many cool piece of technology that are hamstrung by the lack of the über battery.

  • Giovanni Esposito December 3, 2015 at 6:48am

    Nicely done, very clean design and powerful electronics! Of course this "mini t-hawk" design is limited but for indoor research/artistic purposes I think it's the way to go, much safer and elegant than any other multirotor proposed configuration.

    Nice to see that it needs just 1 prop and 4 vanes to hover that well... Did you try also with just 3 120° vanes?

    For me it's too expensive just for another toy, but I bet Chris Anderson will back you immediatly! :-D

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