An Australian IT services company combined an Amazon Alexa and a service called "what3words" that translates GPS addresses into three unique words to create a MAVLink-compatible drone that can be commanded entirely by voice. The video can't be embedded, so see it here.
DXC Labs has created an experimental voice-activated (Amazon Alexa) and cloud-controlled (AWS IoT) drone that uses three-word identifiers from what3words to provide precise location directions to within three square meters, anywhere in the world. This means the drone operator (such as a first responder or maintenance worker) can easily give a voice command such as “go to location: public warns artist” that will send the drone to a specific place on earth — in this case the historic shipwreck of the HMVS Cerberus, south of Melbourne, Australia.
Getting to Hard-to-Reach Places
The what3words service allows user-friendly routing of the computer-controlled drone to locations that may not have a conventional street address, such as plant and equipment locations, a missing person in a national park, a fire in a large campus, or any location whose street address is inaccurate or ambiguous.
This greatly improves activities such as identifying disaster zone locations for first responders, inspecting power lines and oil rigs, making deliveries to hard-to-reach places, and traveling to any point in the world.
Comments
Thanks for the post Chris. This was actually my project. We released the video just the other day. My favorite part of all this was the integration into W3W allowing me to fly the drone not just using N,S,E,W but to actually send it to a specific location.