Blog about Robotics Introduction, news of the robot, information about the robot, sharing knowledge about the various kinds of robots, shared an article about robots, and others associated with the robot
Drones can deliver the news, but they also are news. In this podcast, Matt Waite — Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, professor and founder of the world’s first drone journalism lab — will talk about how the media shapes our perception of drones, how drones will change reporting, aerial technology and just why a bird’s-eye view affects us so deeply. Listen on Soundcloud and subscribe to always get the latest.
Last week the FAA announced that it would soon require all drones in the US to be registered. It’s still only half a story, though, because the agency is undecided where they’ll draw lines in terms of size, weight and type of use. The DoT did, however, invite several industry leaders, 3DR included, to advise them as they develop registration requirements.
We’re generally in favor of registration. It will, among other things, solve the problem of how to trace a rogue drone back to the user. But we don’t want registration to be a burden on our customers. We also believe there may exist acceptable technological alternatives to federal registration.
But the kicker: They only have one month to figure this out.
And the consequences for you? Apparently it will be up to a $27,000 civil fine and, if warranted, a criminal fine of up to $250,000 and/or three years in jail.
And for a short time, you too can speak up. The FAA has opened a fifteen-day window for public comments. That window now has about a week before it closes. So please make your voice heard, not in the comments section this time, but to the FAA through the portal you can access here.
Thanks in advance for your support. And now, the stories that mattered this week.
After a reported 13 shark attacks in Australia, authorities plan to use drones and tracking apps to monitor sharks off the coast of the deceptively named New South Wales. (Punn.) (RT)
The Harvard Microbotics lab has developed the first insect-sized robot capable of both flying and swimming. “Through various theoretical, computational and experimental studies, we found that the mechanics of flapping propulsion are actually very similar in air and in water,” said Kevin Chen, a graduate student in the Harvard Microrobotics Lab at SEAS. “In both cases, the wing is moving back and forth. The only difference is the speed at which the wing flaps.” (phys.org)
Class clowns rejoice: Parrot, who brought us the Rolling Spider, has partnered with a Kickstarter project to develop and market paper plane drones you can control with your head. Parrot runs APM. Substitute teachers, we’re very, very sorry. (New York Daily News)
Video
Drones not only capture great video of killer whales, but biologists can use these images to study them. (Huewire)
Josh Haner, who won a Pulitzer Prize for photography, used drones to visually, and beautifully, capture the melting of Greenland’s icecap. (New York Times)
Across the world, tech companies are engineering a future of robot helpers and smart healthcare for the elderly. But this new vision of the welfare state lacks one crucial element: dignity
Singapore’s old people have never had it so good: now, there’s a robot to help them keep fit and healthy. RoboCoach, their new best friend, offers both encouragement and exercise tips. Its message is unambiguous: get your exercise routines wrong – skipping them no longer seems optional – and you put extra strain on the country’s overstretched public finances.
As Singapore’s minister for communication and information put it, RoboCoach “is able to ensure that old people perform the exercise routines correctly so as to get maximum benefit from their workouts”. Free advice to Singaporean authorities: why not couple RoboCoach 2.0 with a fancy wristband like Pavlok, sending an electric shock every time its users slack off and deviate from established objectives?
We’re happy to announce that the Federal Aviation Administration has asked 3DR to participate in its Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Registration Task Force.
This Monday the FAA announced it would consider mandatory registration for domestic drones. Registration would go a ways toward solving the problem of attribution, of tracing a rogue drone back to its owner in the event of a crash or reckless flying. However, it’s still not clear which types, weight classes or uses of drones would require registration. The FAA has given itself a month to figure out how to approach registration requirements, and they invited us to join the Task Force to advise the agency and help them meet this ambitious goal.
While we agree with the idea of registration in general, we don’t want it to put an undue burden on our customers.
Our drones have set industry benchmarks for safety. We built an air brake into the Solo controller, along with an adjustable flight ceiling, in-app training videos, automatic return-home, in-flight failsafes, flight log recording on both the drone and the controller, and an innovative flight control system that combines the autopilot with an onboard computer, greatly reducing the chances of a system error. On the Task Force we’ll contribute our expertise with this technology to represent the interests of our customers, our community and our industry at large.
And you can join in. The FAA has opened a 15-day window for public comments, which you can access here. We encourage all of you to make your voices heard.
Disney’s robotic healthcare assistant may become a reality, thanks to advances in inflatable technology
For those who thought inflatable technology began and ended with air beds and water wings, think again. The latest trends suggest that inflatables will soon be taking on important roles in hospitals and farms – as a part of robotics.
The vast majority of robots in the world reside in factories – they are solid mechanical machines with arms that can grip, hold objects, and carry out tasks such as assembling, painting, or welding. Their ability to be accurate, reliable and to work 24/7 has long made them attractive to manufacturers and they are now catching the eye of hospital managers who are under increasing pressure to provide services but lack the funds to pay the staff to do them. Robotic surgical systems have been in use for more than a decade, providing help and increased accuracy for some operations, but they are niche. Arguably a much bigger impact can be made by using robots to help with more mundane but far more numerous tasks, such as lifting patients on to beds and helping them to the bathroom.
We all need to focus on which jobs are the best use of humans’ unique talents and abilities, as well as which jobs will require our decision-making capacity
From the grocery store to the factory floor, once common jobs have become tasks done by robots. The ability to automate work and use artificial intelligence to augment everyday tasks is ever growing, and the nature of change in the workforce is accelerating as robots start to walk outside factories, the whir of drones grows louder in the air and driverless cars are poised to join us on the streets in cities nationwide.
This is going to have an ever-larger effect on the workforce. But instead of asking ourselves which jobs will be replaced, we need to shift the conversation to answer the question: what jobs do we want humans to do?
Technology is simply the making of things and the making of things can’t by its own nature be ugly or there would be no possibility for beauty in the arts, which also include the making of things. Actually a root word of technology, techne originally meant ‘art.’ The ancient Greeks never separated art from manufacture in their minds, and so never developed separate words for them.
– Robert Pirsig, Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Welcome to the first episode of our original sci-fi miniseries, Life After Gravity. (Watch the first episode here.) Each episode will be accompanied by one of these blogs in which we’ll dive deep into the technical details that went into shooting each episode.
Background
The whole concept behind Solo is simple: Make it easy for anyone to get cinematic shots. In the LAG series we’re filming on Solo—and only on Solo—to illustrate just what this means for filmmaking. Every shot here is made with Solo, and for most of them we use Solo’s Smart Shot technology, which not only makes it easy, but gives each shot a polish that’s nearly impossible to replicate without a professional pilot. We also wanted to illustrate that you can now tell an enormous story—this one is on a global scale—on a limited budget: most of the costs of production went to travel; all other production costs were relatively negligible.
(By the way, the users and 3DR team that contributed to this aren’t professional pilots—they’re filmmakers whom Solo has empowered to function as professional pilots. But more on that later.)
We achieved this ease of use and polish through the integration of two 1 GHz Linux computers with the traditional autopilot system, and the addition of a gimbal that works intelligently with that system. This means that Solo not only flies on set tracks in space, but it can actually point the camera for you, allowing you to set not only paths but also frame-to-frame narration.
The significance of this seemingly small bit of Solo’s technology wasn’t obvious even to us until we started shooting this series. With these blogs, and the behind-the-scenes field reports, we’ll show you everything Smart Shots can do.
Below you’ll find our behind-the-scenes video and a run-down of how Solo’s technology contributed to the making of the first episode.
Key shots from episode one
Opening shot: Man on bench at dawn; Cable cam
We got this shot with Cable cam. Interestingly enough, this shot—like many others in the series—was not originally on our shot list. We encountered it in the field when our team, on its way to get a shot that was on the list, walked by a man sitting contemplatively on a bench. Our director was struck by this image, and decided to capture it with one of our own actors.
This is a big part of the genesis of Solo: To have everything you need in one backpack, with absolute minimal assembly needed so you can quickly get in position to get the shot. This allows you to take advantage of moments—it’s as close as possible to having a drone, like a camera, around your neck.
While the rest of the team continued on its way to the original shot, our director Adam popped Solo out of the backpack and one of our actors sat on the bench. Adam set a cable not according to waypoints, but according to each frame in the narrative he wanted to capture. The narrative went like this: a dawn breaks over the sea; we drop down to reveal the character on the bench; and then rise back up to the sea, and a new day that now has been recontextualized by the movement between these frames as the beginning of a new era, and this man’s journey.
Cable cam setup here was simple:
Select Cable cam from the Smart Shot menu
Fly Solo to the first frame, get the camera in perfect position and hit the A button on the controller to set your first frame
Fly Solo to set your second frame—this wasn’t a straight camera move, but involved a slight twist that you’d otherwise have to execute manually—and hit the B button to set the second frame
Press A to return Solo to first frame, where it has memorized not only the point in space, but also the orientation and gimbal/camera position
Press B and Solo flies down the cable, automatically interpolating the camera from first frame to the second, including the slight twist, while automatically slowing as it approaches the end of the cable to smooth out the shot
Press A again and it returns up to the first frame, now changed by the newly revealed character in this context
On the first take, Solo moved a little too fast for Adam’s taste. He wanted to capture a shot with a “more cinematic, brooding” feel. Solution? Not flying another take—or several—and risking manual slips that might ruin shot, but simply going into Cable cam’s settings, right there in the app, and pushing back the slider for Solo’s speed. Two takes and Solo nailed the exact shot that Adam envisioned—the spontaneous shot that ended up becoming the opening to the entire series, with plenty of battery left over.
I should mention at this point that Adam is not a professional pilot—he’s a director, and on all of his shoots before Solo he’s relied on a pilot or two to bring his vision into reality. Only on this series with Solo has he himself, by himself, been able to execute with professional quality on that vision. What’s more, this relatively inexperienced pilot hardly ever looked up at the drone—instead, he could look at the controller and screen as if he were using a camera, and use that set up a true narrative.
What we learned from this shot:
Solo is so easy to assemble and use that it allows even new pilots to improvise or react to the moment without worrying about technical risks. We took advantage of this from here out.
Solo allows your thinking to shift from production and setup of a shot to finding and creating the magic of a moment. Instead of point to point, you can think of frame to frame—not flight paths, but a narrative, a story.
Instead of looking up to worry about the drone, you can look down at the screen in your hands, effectively turning the controller into a camera.
Mysterious Eon“honeycomb” building; Orbit
This is, in my opinion, one of the coolest shots of the whole series. As opposed to the shot described above, this one illustrates scouting and planning: design along with ease of execution.
We found this building with a Google search. It’s the Soumaya Museum, located in Mexico City. (Authorities were on site and had no issue with us flying and filming there.) In the film this building serves as one of the offices of Eon, an enormous global tech corporation with unknown and possibly dangerous or even sinister motives. This shot establishes this building, which as yet has a still unknown function; it’s possible the building contains a thorium reactor.
We first planned to use Orbit to get a wraparound shot that we designed specifically to establish this as an iconic building in the film, as well as to do the architecture justice. However, when we got on set we discovered what Orbit can really do: It’s dynamic absolutely amazing, and this discovery changed the way we approached just about every shot from there out.
Orbit, it turns out, it way more than a perfect circle—it’s a perfect circle with elasticity. You should first know that Orbit is not your everyday wraparound shot. It’s a dynamic Smart Shot that allows you to play with the elasticity of a circle in real time, while Solo automatically maintains its orbiting movement around your focal point. (The altitude of this focal point, by the way, is also adjustable in real time.) Kick Solo into an Orbit and you’re free to use the controller sticks to play with the circle’s radius and Solo’s altitude while Solo continues on its track, simultaneously adjusting its orientation and the camera in real time to accommodate whatever angular shifts you’re commanding. Once we discovered this, we changed the whole shot, and it became one of our favorites in the series.
Instead of starting with the entire building, we could now begin with a close-up of the strange honeycomb pattern of the wall, giving no context to what it was part of.
Then we put Solo into Orbit and pull the radius out while simultaneously pushing the altitude up and around to reveal this incredible futuristic work of art and architecture, a “corkscrew” move that allowed us to replicate artistically the compelling parabolic momentum of the architecture.
You can also notice that even though Solo maintains its constant airspeed (which actually is adjustable in the app), as we increase the circle’s radius the movement appears to slow down. This is physics: as you expand the radius you’re traveling without changing your ground speed, you reduce what’s called your “angular velocity”; that is, to cover the same circumference in the same amount of time Solo would have to travel faster as you pull back. You may have heard this about a record as it spins—a dot on the outer edge has to travel faster than a dot on the inner edge. The result here is that Solo appears to slow—as if you smoothly applied the brakes to the shot—which visually gives the building a feeling of weight and permanence as it becomes established.
Think about all of the possibilities and combinations that this gives you as a filmmaker: improvisation, speed, direction, height, distance, and combinations of all the above. This isn’t just an orbit in the way planet Earth orbits the sun—it’s as if Earth’s orbit could, well, defy gravity.
Only 3DR’s Smart Shots can get this kind of shot.
Here’s how we corkscrewed Solo:
Select the Orbit Smart Shot in the Solo app, then set your focal point by moving the map with your finger so the pin of your focal point is exactly where you want it
Fly Solo to where you want your Orbit to start, letting it hang there as long as you want while you get ready to execute the shot
Select which direction you want Solo to Orbit—in this case to the left
In the app, set the speed you’d like Solo to move
Press “play” to set Solo in motion
Solo begins its orbit, keeping the camera on the central point
Now you’re free to play with the radius and altitude using the controller
To perform this corkscrew shot, pull back on the left stick to expand the circle’s radius while pushing up on the right stick to raise Solo’s altitude
Solo maintains its speed and focus on its own, which means not only staying on the central point but also adjusting the camera for you as you change the circle’s altitude and elasticity
And voila: an aerial shot from design to execution in just a few minutes, doing justice to an incredible building that took years and years from design to execution.
What we learned:
Orbit is insane. And easy. See above.
But that’s not shot on Solo!
Some observant viewers no doubt noticed the first-person close-up on the controller and phone screen, with a pair of hands working the controls. Some of you might cry foul—that’s not shot on Solo! But it was.
We didn’t do this just to be cheeky and adhere technically to the promise of the series. It was actually easier to shoot this on Solo than it would have been using a chest-mounted camera.
How we did it:
Rest Solo on the pilot’s arms
Roll GoPro
The pilot kept Solo level, and the gimbal kept the camera stable. A chest-mounted camera wouldn’t have been this stable. Plus, we could monitor the GoPro feed live, wirelessly and remotely, which is only possible through Solo.
For some of the cave shots we had to use a handheld Solo—for instance the shots looking up—with the gimbal keeping the camera stable. However, we shot in two caves, with one acting as a double. That cave double—the Cave of Swallows—is thousands of years old and deep enough to hold the Chrysler Building. This cave is sacred to the local Huastecs, as are the birds that live there. The birds in these shots (noted in the shot list below) are 100% real, but out of respect we didn’t want to fly Solo around them. We filmed instead with a handheld Solo.
What we learned:
You can easily substitute Solo for a handheld or body rig
Solo actually has advantages over handheld rigs, such as a stabilized and wireless live HD feed
The Birds
The birds coming out of the cave at the end were not shot on Solo. They were added later in animation. But except for them, and a few birds that flit right in front of the camera, all the other birds are real. Even the solitary white one in the swamp. See shot list below.
Shot List with Smart Shot modes:
Beach: Cable cam
Eon building: Orbit
Meteorite strike: Cable cam
Pachuca: Manual
Pachuca road: Orbit
Jungle van: Cable cam
Solo air-to-air: Manual
Solo air-to-air: Cable cam
Controller: Armheld Solo
Cave reveal: Cable cam
Descent into cave: Manual (no GPS in a 800 ft-deep cave)
Cave descender: Handheld Solo
Cave interior pan: Manual
Walkie communication: Handheld Solo
Blue suit descending: Cable cam
Cave pa to, explorer: Manual
Swamp: Cable cam, then nudge the yaw stick to pan cam and follow birds
Cave exploring, walkie: Handheld Solo
Cabled descent into cave: Cable cam
FPV inside mask: Manual
Jungle explorers: Manual w/programmed tilt control
Two explorers: Manual walking
Swamp birds: Cable cam
Breaching clouds: Manual w/programmed tilt control
Birds escaping: Handheld Solo (Cave of Swallows)
Exploring cave: Manual
Bird vortex: Handheld with digital shake (Cave of Swallows)
Discovering element: Manual
Dangling rope: Handheld
Birds escaping: Cable (animated birds)
Ascent from cave: Cable
Contemplation: Orbit
The Science behind the Series
In this series we present, draw inspiration from, and take liberties with science, theories and technologies we find compelling or useful.
Referenced or inspired in this episode:
00:51: EON’s HQ masquerading as a Thorium Reactor: A solution to our energy problems—or is it?
02:43, 03:37, 03:56: Birds of a distant lake respond to the experience of their cave dwelling cousins via Morphic Resonance. That we’re all connected in ways we can feel but not see is a romantic idea, but is it reality?
This summer 3DR’s CEO Chris Anderson appeared on CBS This Morning, talking drones across the desk from Charlie Rose. Eventually and ineluctably Chris was pressed on issues of safety and privacy. His response? A phrase that’s since gone viral—well, in as much as a catchphrase about drone safety can be said to have gone viral.
“Mass jackassery.”
Chris was jokingly referring to the consequences of a strange paradox that’s arisen in the age of consumer drones: As drones get more sophisticated and easier to use, users themselves get less sophisticated. There are two reasons for this: The ease of use means the drone user group will expand beyond hobbyists who have been flying for years to people who haven’t flown at all; and the ease of use also means that these same inexperienced users can now fly drones almost without thinking. By cutting out the process of learning to fly, we’ve also cut out the process of learning about flying: how to fly responsibly; what the rules are; where not to fly; what to do if something goes wrong.
This combination is what gives rise to “mass jackassery”: reckless or uninformed flying that could have dangerous results. And even though drones are easy targets for irresponsiblysensationalist and intentionally provocative journalism, this kind of flying is a real concern for the drone community—including manufacturers like ourselves.
The FAA has responded just this week by fast-tracking a set of rules that would require drones to be registered. Right now we only have half the story—we don’t know which weight classes the FAA will require registration—but as an industry leader, there are certainly steps we can take to keeping the skies safe outside of regulatory requirements.
So: what do we do about it?
Chris made his thoughts known. Last month he published a short essay in Hackaday addressing this very topic. It gets a little technical, so I’ll break it down for you here.
How to regulate drones is an important question, because we’re establishing precedents for a new and soon widespread technology. These first steps are big ones: We have to choose carefully and mindfully the direction we’re going to take.
Mainly we in the industry want to develop viable solutions before governments step in to do that for us. The reason? Regulatory overreaction and overreach could unintentionally ground drones in many legitimate use cases, or make it cumbersome to get flying in the first place, stunting research and economic potential. But Chris also points out that there’s actually a government precedent for solving a regulatory problem like the one we face today.
When the FCC opened up the bandwidth spectrum that we now use for WiFi (2.4 GHz), it released a set of useful guidelines that we can apply to creating a similar open spectrum of sky for drones:
The space isn’t already being used
Potential for harm is low. (Low transmission power in the case of Wifi. Small drones in our case.)
The technology knows when it might cause interference, and can keep out of the way
If the FAA takes similar steps so that drones can meet these requirements, they’ll be effectively integrated into their own “sandbox” in the national airspace. Which brings us to Chris’s general thesis: Technology can solve the problems it creates.
Solo is already smart. But we can make it even smarter—make it truly self-aware—so that it knows when and where it can fly. Here’s how we do it.
Drones, with communications based on cell and wifi transmission, are already plugged into our national information network—even plugged in to “the cloud.” Drones can leverage this existing network to communicate and inform. They can even regulate themselves: If your drone sends a signal of its position to the cloud and gets a message back that it’s too close to an airport, for instance, the user might get a “red light,” or a “you can’t fly here” message and explanation. Drones can also use this data network to send information to each other about their position in real time, so they could in effect communicate through a virtual air traffic control system, keeping clear of each other’s signals.
Different manufacturers may of course choose to take different approaches to where and how their products let you fly, but integrating drones into some sort of uniform national air traffic control scheme like the above is a necessity. As Chris jokes in his essay, yes, this means making Skynet self-aware. But better self-aware than self-destructive.
Artificial intelligence experts point to looming danger amid unpredictable technology and fears that technology could ‘seduce us into warfare’
Experts in artificial intelligence, lawyers and activists organized by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots gathered at the United Nations on Tuesday to warn against a growing reliance on cheap drones and “stupid AI” that can be unpredictable in the real world.
“Terminator always comes up,” Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, told reporters on Tuesday, referring to the sci-fi cyborg on a mission to wipe out mankind. “But it’s not really Terminator that we’re worried about at the moment. I think that Terminator is perhaps 50 or so years away.”
Latest test caught on camera as company’s Project Wing morphs into new quadcopter drone shape for smooth package drop
Amazon isn’t the only company working on drone delivery, Google’s Project Wing aims to beat the retailer to the punch with a drone that will fly five miles in five minutes.
The drone has changed quite a lot since its initial unveiling, looking like a big fixed wing aircraft with propellers lining its edge. The design added flying speed, but was eventually deemed unfeasible for delivery operations. The latest test drone takes a more conventional quadcopter shape with added aerofoils.
Today we launched our “Made for Solo” program. The short of it is that MFS supports companies that want to leverage the Solo Smart Drone platform to make and market their own drone accessories.
You could say that we built Made for Solo into Solo. From the beginning we designed Solo to be an open platform that would encourage and enable people and companies around the world to innovate and add to its features and capabilities.
This was a promise to our customers: The Solo you buy today is more than just a drone; it’s a platform that will only get better with time. You won’t have to go out and buy Solo 2 for the latest technology. And we’re happy to say that over the coming weeks the Solo platform will start delivering on that promise.
The term “platform” hasbeen really overused, though. It’s nearly lost its meaning. So here’s a punchy overview of the program, and why it matters to our users.
“Open wins”; or, “The Moth Bomb Use Case”
Solo has two hardware openings: an open accessory bay and an open gimbal bay. Developers — anyone, really — are free to tap into either of these. What’s more, you also have direct access to Solo’s onboard Linux computer, a 1 GHz Cortex ARM-9 processor that has computing overhead we’ve barely touched. So now you could use the accessory bay to power a Solo lighting accessory, for instance. Or develop a new gimbal to support another type of camera or sensor. Or hook up an augmented reality device.
Those are some examples that as drone makers and users we’re already pretty familiar with. We anticipate a lot of them. And they’ll bring a lot of cool features to your Solo, as you’ll see later. But right now we’re talking about open, and what’s exciting and powerful about “open” are the things Solo will support that we wouldn’t ever be able to predict.
For instance, I learned last week that drones are being used to bomb farms with moths. These are sterile moths. The hope is that these sterile moths mate with the moths that are already there destroying the crops, resulting in sterile offspring and a dead end for those moth populations.
The point: No drone company, no matter how innovative, could have planned ahead for the moth bomb use case.
This is the beginning of what we know as the “drones &” movement. This is huge. In the past, drone development was limited to dedicated engineering departments within drone companies themselves. But Made for Solo means that now companies across an array of industries can begin applying new and purpose-built hardware and software to drones for a variety of specific uses. Made for Solo provides partners both inside and outside of the drone and camera industries with the easiest way to get started on drone development.
The best part is that with more and more people developing on Solo, it will become useful to more and more people, who will adopt it and come up with more and more ideas. We don’t know where all this will take Solo, but we’re pumped to go there. It’s going to change the industry, and it’s going to change your drone.
What’s in it for my Solo?
Basically, lots of cool new stuff.
Several new Made for Solo accessories are already coming down the program’s pipes and will soon be showcased on the 3DR website. Additionally, 3DR is announcing the first three major Made for Solo industry partnerships—Epson, Kodak and Fiilex—who already have Solo accessory products under development and scheduled for release.
First there’s JK Imaging, which is making Kodak’s PIXPRO SP360 action cameras. These cameras will capture full 360° spherical video with a unique lens. It’s the beginning of VR for drones, and it’s coming soon to Solo.
And then there’s Epson, who’s developing a suite of augmented reality flight tools, such as its Moverio AR Glasses, to expand your Solo experience.
Lastly, Fiilex, which will offer a line of innovative lighting accessories fully compatible with your Solo.
This is good news for you because MFS will offer you a wide array of accessory options for you to pick and choose. You can customize your Solo however you’d like without locking into one single product with a fixed set of abilities.
What’s more
All MFS products are approved by 3DR as fully compatible with Solo. These are official Solo accessories, and they’re co-branded with the 3DR logo. This means we’ve put all approved and showcased MFS accessories through an in-house testing and evaluation process to ensure their effectiveness, value and full compatibility with the Solo system.
Developers who join the MFS program will also have access to our technical and research resources. Production really is a partnership, from initial CADs to retail shelves.
Do you want in?
Made for Solo is accessible to any company or individual that wants to take their technologies to the sky. All interested parties can apply to the program through a form available on the MFS web page: 3dr.com/MFS-apply.
We also offer comprehensive developer support on multiple levels. At the highest level, dev.3dr.com offers all of the resources for anyone to develop on Solo. Inside dev.3dr.com is 3DR’s open software development platform calledDroneKit, which is a streamlined and simple interface that allows anyone to create customized drone apps. When combined with the Made for Solo program, these resources make it easy for developers anywhere to tap into new Made for Solo products and contribute even more functionality.
And because we’ve got our roots in the largest open robotics community in the world —diydrones.com— this development community can also contribute to exponential advancements through the synthesis of open hardware and open software that the Made for Solo program will catalyze. Learn more about the Made for Solo program by visiting 3dr.com/MFS.
3DR LAUNCHES “MADE FOR SOLO,” A PARTNERSHIP PROGRAM TO HELP COMPANIES DEVELOP AND MARKET NEW DRONE HARDWARE
The drone maker also announces the first Made for Solo products as well as major new development partnerships with Epson, JK Imaging (Kodak) and Fiilex.
3DR, North America’s largest consumer drone manufacturer, launched a new third-party product partnership program called “Made for Solo” at GITEX Technology Week in Dubai. The Made for Solo program supports companies that want to leverage 3DR’s Solo “Smart Drone” platform and its open hardware bays and dual computer processing power. Made for Solo also offers partners access to 3DR’s technical and research resources and official 3DR endorsement of a product’s compatibility with Solo. The program also marks the beginning of the “drones &” movement, as companies across an array of industries will now begin applying new and purpose-built hardware and software to drones for a variety of specific uses; Made for Solo provides these partners with the easiest way to get started on drone development.
“In the past, drone development was limited to dedicated engineering departments within drone companies themselves,” says Chris Anderson, CEO of 3D Robotics. “We’re excited that our open platform is already paying dividends with Made for Solo, opening opportunities for drone development to a range of companies from a range of industries. We’re about to experience a real sea change in this industry.”
Several new Made for Solo accessories are already in the program and will soon be showcased on the 3DR website. Additionally, 3DR is announcing the first three major Made for Solo industry partnerships—Epson, Kodak and Fiilex—who already have Solo accessory products under development and scheduled for later release.
“Fiilex is very excited to enter the emerging drone market by leveraging the Made for Solo program,” said Brent Siebenaler, Brand Manager of Fiilex. “We’re looking forward to creating some great and innovative lighting products for Solo.”
“We’re excited by the launch of the Made for Solo program and have been busy perfecting a suite of augmented reality flight assistance tools,” said Eric Mizufuka, product manager, Moverio AR Glasses for Epson America. The Made for Solo program is a great opportunity for Epson to gain direct access to 3DR’s top pilots, makers, and developers.”
And Paul Meyhoefer, VP of Marketing & Product Development for JK Imaging Ltd., said, “The Made for Solo Program has opened the Virtual Reality door for our KODAK PIXPRO SP360 Action Cams to be used in a variety of new ways. “Matched with Solo, the SP360’s ability to capture 360° full spherical video with its unique lens and perspective lends itself perfectly to being a vital tool for creatives to develop and take their VR to new heights.”
Made for Solo is accessible to any company or individual that wants to take their technologies to the sky. All interested parties can apply to the program through a form available on the company’s website 3dr.com/MFS-apply. The company expects the program to continually grow and evolve, with Solo evolving in step with it.
“The Made for Solo program is the beginning of what we think will be an exponential expansion of our ecosystem, with many companies both in the drone industry and in other industries adopting the Solo platform,” said Colin Guinn, CRO of 3D Robotics. “From the beginning we’ve made the promise to customers that Solo will be more than just a drone, it will be a platform for aerial innovation, and it’s exciting to see that promise coming to fruition so quickly. Honestly, there’s been a deluge of these new products, and we can’t wait to see what creative people and companies will do now to enhance the Solo experience.”
In conjunction with these efforts, 3DR also offers comprehensive developer support on multiple levels. At the highest level, dev.3dr.com offers all of the resources for anyone to develop on Solo. Inside dev.3dr.com is 3DR’s open software development platform calledDroneKit, which is a streamlined and simple interface that allows anyone to create customized drone apps. When combined with the Made for Solo program, these resources make it easy for developers anywhere to tap into new Made for Solo products and contribute even more functionality. And because the company has its roots in the largest open robotics community in the world —diydrones.com— it expects that this development community will contribute to exponential advancements through the synthesis of open hardware and open software that the Made for Solo program will catalyze.
You can learn more about the Made for Solo program by visiting 3dr.com/MFS .
About JK Imaging, Ltd.
JK Imaging, Ltd., is a privately held company headquartered in Los Angeles, California, with additional sales offices worldwide. The executive team is comprised of experienced sales and marketing officers with extensive backgrounds in digital imaging and global distribution. JK Imaging, Ltd. services North America, South America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. For more information, visitwww.kodakpixpro.com
AboutFiilex
Fiilex designs and manufactures high quality LED lighting products for the image capture industry. Incorporating patented Dense Matrix LED technology, Fiilex produces portable and powerful specular sources that boast high Color Rendering Index (CRI) and dynamic color tuning capabilities. Since the initial announcement of the brand in January 2013, Fiilex has released numerous revolutionary LED lighting fixtures and a variety of innovative light modifiers. In a very short span, Fiilex has won major contracts in the North American broadcast market and established a wide dealer network around the world. Fiilex is one of the most sought after new lighting brands in the market.
About Epson
Epson is a global innovation leader dedicated to exceeding expectations with solutions for markets as diverse as the office, home, commerce, and industry. Epson’s lineup ranges from inkjet printers, printing systems and 3LCD projectors to industrial robots, smart glasses and sensing systems and is based on original compact, energy-saving, and high-precision technologies.
Led by the Japan-based Seiko Epson Corporation, the Epson Group comprises more than 72,000 employees in 94 companies around the world, and is proud of its ongoing contributions to the global environment and the communities in which it operates. Epson America, Inc. based in Long Beach, Calif. is Epson’s regional headquarters for the U.S., Canada, and Latin America. To learn more about Epson, please visit:www.epson.com.
Note: Specifications are subject to change without notice. 3DR and Solo are trademarks of 3D Robotics, Inc. EPSON and Moverio are registered trademarks of Seiko Epson Corporation. All other product and brand names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
University of Leeds is leading a pioneering £4.2m project to develop robots that can fix street lights and potholes with minimal disruption
A university is leading a pioneering £4.2m project to create “self-repairing cities” by developing robots that can fix street lights and potholes.
Researchers at the University of Leeds will develop small robots to identify problems with utility pipes, street lights and roads and fix them with minimal disruption to the public.
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Question of the week
I was lucky enough to spend a few days last week at the prestigious Eddie Adams photojournalism workshop in the foothills of the Catskills. The trees were basically on fire with fall, a welcome change from Austin, where it’s truthfully still over ninety nearly every day.
We brought a Solo with us, and it was a hit. Most of the college-age crowd knew a lot about drones already, and many of them wanted to get their thumbs on the sticks. We—and they—got some really interesting video, and I’ll soon be dropping a long-form blog on the whole experience.
But the weekend also raised the question of what a camera drone’s core competency really is—video or stills? How do you primarily use your flying cameras? Do you find your drone particularly suited to one medium? Why? Let me know in the comments below.
After rejecting three drone privacy bills last month, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill into law preventing paparazzi from flying drones onto private property to take a picture or make a recording. The bill explicitly extends the definition of “physical invasion of privacy” to include drones. (LA Times)
After an Amtrak derailment a couple of weeks ago, authorities in Vermont used a drone to get critical aerial imagery to help them respond to and document the incident. Here’s how they did it. (Slate)
Culture and commentary
A new anti-drone gun makes shotguns look positively antediluvian. The gun (it really looks like a gun) uses intense radio pulses to confuse the drone into thinking it’s gone out of range; the drone will then enter into one of its failsafe modes, either hovering, returning to home or landing where it is. However, because the weapon uses radio frequencies governed by the FCC, it can currently only be used by the federal government. Back to your pitchforks and torches. (Motherboard)
Here’s an in-depth profile of Ismail Morina, the man who incited a riot in an Albanian soccer stadium by flying a drone bearing the Albanian nationalist flag over a Serbian team. (NY Times)
A team of rivals: Facebook and Google are joining forces to begin integrating their high-altitude internet-delivery drones into the airspace. (Technology Review)
High tech
A team of teammates: A group at ETH Zurich is pairing rovers with aerial counterparts who can use their birds-eye perspective to help the rovers navigate unfamiliar territory. (Mashable)
A new concept car from Rinspeed features a drone landing and charging dock. It’s more of a promotional stunt and probably not going to be developed, but—shameless self-promotion—I gave SlashGear my thoughts on the plausibility of the concept anyway. (SlashGear)
A new meaning to “flight of stairs”: A project at MIT is developing furniture drones, turning household objects into “flying smart agents.” (Motherboard)
The USDA is experimenting with using drones to bomb cotton fields with irradiated moths. Moths are notoriously destructive to cotton, but the hope here is that the moths already in the field will mate with these sterile moths and produce sterile offspring, cauterizing population growth. (Popular Science)
DARPA is developing drones that self-destruct after completing their mission. The drones’ wings will dissolve, just like the wings of Icarus in Greek mythology. And yes, the program is called ICARUS. It’s a full-out acronym and everything. (Popular Science)
Not for the faint of heart: A man flies a drone into a rattlesnake pit. First, this death hole seems to actually exist naturally in the real world, so good luck to those walking anywhere in Texas outside the city limits of Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antone. Second, he tries to provoke the clearly agitated snakes by flying the drone right in their faces—which, even if they’re rattlesnakes, strikes me as cruel—who predictably attack and bring the drone down into their writhing hell-ditch of poison. Then he retrieves the drone with a hockey stick. “Game on, Wayne!” “Game on, Gahhhhhhhh snakes!” (Daily Dot)
Flyability posted a very cool video of its Gimball drones—housed in protective cages—lit with LEDs and bouncing around a forest at night. The company’s drones won the first annual international “Drones for Good” prize. (IEEE Spectrum)
The Solo Gimbal is out there in the wild, and we’re seeing some stunning footage you all are shooting. That’s awesome.
As we head into the end of the year, we wanted to share a few things that are coming soon.
The gimbal production line has been cranking without major hiccups. Limited availability of Solo and the gimbal should soon be a thing of the past.
In terms of software, over the course of the summer we’ve been rolling out features and quality improvements, and there’s more of that to come.
In the latest (first week of October) release, you’ll notice a few key things. First, we’ve improved the gimbal stabilization performance. Your Smart Shots should be smoother and more stable than ever, and the gimbal system as a whole will be even more reliable. You’ll also notice that the radio link is more robust, allowing you to fly with confidence in more places at greater range. Solo will lose link less often when it is close to you (within 1000-foot range), and your overall range should be noticeably longer. GPS lock has improved, too; you should get GPS lock faster than before, especially after your first flight in a new location.
Overall, you should notice a nice big step in the overall robustness of the Solo user experience.
We’re also rolling out more GoPro control features. You’ve been able to start and stop recording on the GoPro already. (Pro-tip: In addition to start/stop record from the, clicking in the pitch paddle on the controller starts and stops GoPro control.) In the middle of this month, we will also roll out mode-switching: This will allow you to switch from video to photo mode during flight straight from the app.
You can now create a user account via Facebook or Google login. This new login method underpins a more advanced user and support system. We have improved our automatic log analysis so that if you should ever need to submit a trouble ticket, we’ll be able to diagnose your issue more quickly and more accurately. Our support team is now using tools that automatically parse your Solo’s logs to help identify problems, doing the work a human engineer once had to do manually.
We call this system BlackBox, and it’s pretty slick. The user accounts will help us track your system over time so that the log analysis tools work even better. And don’t worry, we won’t be collecting data if you don’t want us to—you can control this via a setting in the app. Again, the overall point of this work is to keep you and your Solo up and running, and confirm for you that we stand behind Solo and your experience with it.
By the way, we have even more in store for our November release. Tipping our hand a little bit, we’ll be rolling out finer control of GoPro settings early on in that month, giving you complete control of the GoPro during flight.
There you have it. In summary, we’ve got our complete Solo and gimbal system out there, and we’re improving the user experience in big steps by increasing overall robustness and adding new features. Thanks for choosing Solo, and thanks for choosing 3DR.
Forget about the day-to-day grind of your job – that’ll soon be a robot’s concern, says Richard Newton
There’s a clue to the future of work in the relief you feel when your phone call to a big corporation is answered by, of all things, a human.
It makes sense. People are replete with empathy and compassion, like to solve problems and enjoy communicating through stories. And these profoundly human traits are the areas where artificial intelligence (AI) trails humans. Because they are our strengths they point to the future of the office and to our workplace relationships with robots and AI.
City state will introduce robotic personal trainer to five senior activity centres to help country’s ageing population to stay healthy
It can’t fight crime or act as a butler but Robocoach is working with Singapore’s older citizens to help them stay healthy with regular exercise.
The android with metal arms and a screen for a face is already leading sessions and will roll out its services to five “senior activity centres” across the city-state this year, according to Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), a government body that supports the country’s tech industry.
We share some of the newest, most fun and helpful tech ideas
A robotic toy comprised of electronic cubes, Robo hopes to be the Lego of the digital age, allowing children or rookie coders to build functioning, programmable robots with interchangeable parts commanded by a Robo app. With the Robo app, the right blocks and a rainy afternoon, you could – according to the Kickstarter page – have a three-wheeled robot nosing around the room, obeying commands and announcing the weather forecast. Assuming the Kickstarter crowdfunding is successful, a fairly primitive Robo starter kit will cost £85 and arrive through your door next summer. As a nod to its forebear, the Robo is also “Lego-compatible”, meaning you can artistically bedeck your creation with retro bricks.
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Question of the Week
This week the FAA made national headlines when it slapped SkyPan, an aerial photography company that provides its services to major real estate entities, with a $1.9 million dollar fine. The dollar amount dwarfs the FAA’s previous largest fine of $18,700 by orders of magnitude. Motherboard was all over the story, and published a fascinating account of the FAA’s determined and rigorous investigation into SkyPan’s operations, an investigation that lasted from 2012-2014. Mandatory reading if this story interests you.
It’s a significant moment: The FAA is signaling that it’s going to start taking its enforcement role more seriously—in the Motherboard article, an FAA official is quoted as saying the agency is “clearing through its backlog” of similar investigations. It also raises again the as-yet unresolved question of just what the FAA’s jurisdiction over drones really is, an issue addressed in last year’s Raphael Pirker case but ultimately unanswered in the final ruling.
Interestingly enough, SkyPan now holds a Section 333 exemption for commercial use from the FAA—which means that the FAA recently deemed the aerial photography company worthy of conducting the very types of commercial flights that the FAA had already been investigating as illegal for months.
No doubt this case will be protracted in the courts, far from a cut-and-dried decision. But just for kicks, what do you think the outcome here might be?
Will the FAA’s fine stand? Will it be reduced? Will the FAA successfully assert its claim of jurisdiction over even small drones as aircraft? Will it also then secure its claim that all drones are subject to regulation as part the agency’s assignment to keep the National Airspace safe?
Or will SkyPan prevail, defending its right to have operated as a commercial entity during an era when the FAA’s jurisdiction over drones was as-yet undefined?
OR will the courts demur again, pushing the tough questions back further?
I’d love to hear what you have to say. Leave your comments at the bottom of this post.
And now, the links that mattered this week…
Headlines
This isn’t exactly news to folks following this industry, but the FAA has now officially missed its deadline for integrating drones into the National Airspace. The agency was charged with developing rules and regulations for commercial and civil operation, but has so far released nothing beyond its draft of proposed rules back in February. Experts don’t think the official rules will be finalized and implemented until sometime late next year and maybe even 2017. (The Verge)
California Governor Jerry Brown vetoes more drone bills, which he views as superfluous, writing that “each of these bills creates a new crime — usually by finding a novel way to characterize and criminalize conduct that is already proscribed.” (LA Times)
But we may be just a little too late: AXS TV is broadcasting a 90-minute special of the top selections from this year’s New York City Drone Festival. There’s always next year. Barring global catastrophe. (AXS TV)
Vimeo offers a helpful tutorial on how to capture five staple drone shots: The fly-by; the reveal; the chase; the high-pan; and the explorer. Or you can just use Smart Shots.
This summer, a group of scientists from the American Museum of Natural History, who have spent five decades studying polar bears in Manitoba, teamed up with the University of North Dakota UAV department. They conducted drone flights to study the explosive geese population in the province, and the polar bears who feed on them. They’re the first group to receive a permit to use drones in a Canadian national park. (KFGO)
The crew of the International Space Station will receive three drones to help them with various routine tasks. One such task is monitoring the sound levels in the station, which can grow loud enough to damage hearing; these inspections take two hours to conduct manually. The drones (called SPHERES and developed at NASA’s Ames laboratory) will use carbon jets to propel themselves in zero gravity. (The Economist)
Singapore’s postal service conducted its first successful drone delivery, transporting a small package containing a letter and a t-shirt: five kilometers in five minutes. (Bloomberg)
