Edit: Line of site restrictions, maximum heights, and the maximum power of radio communications permitted without additional licensing are typical limiting factors.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYi2NrEAxrs
Hubsan X4 £35-£40, Camera, TX,RX £20-30, Monitor, varies.
So, quadcopter designers out there - please make them less fragile, less crash prone. Can you mount sensors in all directions to keep it from bumping into walls and hovering at the designated location without human intervention? That would be useful.
My 8-yr old god-son got a big quad copter that he can control with an iPod and it has a camera (with real-time video to the iPod). It flies and hovers amazingly well. Of course is was $400+
OpenPilot looked promising but I haven't seen any proof yet.
I suppose putting a camera on it should be doable - but wth 250kbit/sec @ 80m, is it enough?
That'll probably give you 320x240 video (assuming that anything more than that will be too intensive to encode), which might not give you enough visual acuity to remote maneuver the quadcopter. Any thoughts?
It has a USB bus however, so you might hook a smartcamera there if it's lightweight enough.
I'm not sure how much you can lift with it tho, I'm guessing not much.
Then it could fly indefinitely.
I guess you'd need it to carry an AC/DC transformer though? Too heavy?
Probably several kinds of illegal, but it would be pretty neat.
[1] http://www.hizook.com/blog/2012/04/17/wireless-power-transfe...
[2] http://www.hizook.com/blog/2010/07/20/gliding-uav-perches-po...
You didn't realize because you aren't in command of all the facts, or you knew and didn't correlate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis
Using gas in a situation like this isn't like in the movies. Dosages vary tremendously with physiology and interactions with other drugs, so dosing everyone is very likely to produce fatalities. Swarms of TASER-bots would avoid this.
> Or by terrorism do you mean legitimate activist groups that threaten existing power structures?
That's largely a matter of point of view. Is your point of view that anyone who even thinks of the weapons implications of technology automatically is for the oppression of dissent? If so, then this reveals your prejudices. For myself, I think that these sorts of gedankenexperiments about potential military use are interesting and valuable, because they allow for concerned parties to become aware of these possibilities, which is constructive. The automatic tarring of people doing such speculation has the opposite effect.
http://www.google.com/search?q=hubsan%20x4 http://www.google.com/search?q=walkera%20ladybird http://www.google.com/search?q=wltoys%20v929
To name just a few of the better known / more flyable ones.
A full size quad, hex or octo on the other hand can do some serious damage, from serious cuts to digit reduction.
Had a play with a Parrot at the same time and the CrazyFlie was much more nimble but relies on user control.
Felix Geisendörfer did a talk on hacking a Parrot AR at Øredev - https://vimeo.com/41836614 and it was great fun too.
I reckon I'll bust the PCB in about 5 minutes though.
