I love a quad copter and as soon as they come down in price for one that won't blow away in the wind, I'm getting one. Air dog's clever. It's autonomous and follows you while you're out doing extreme sports/riding a bike/walking to the shops/etc.
A neat idea. The autonomy is interesting. All that shit that we litter our streets with will be a bastard to avoid. You're going to have to be a pretty smart quadcopter to avoid lamp-posts, trees (scattering of ultrasound/radar?), road signs and all that.
Watching with interest!
Comments
might I suggest as an alternative the pocket drone (http://www.thepocketdrone.com/) it has most of the same features autopilot follow mode but is about half the price and has the similar fold up put in a bag concept. It's a actually a tricopter with two fixed rotors and a pivoting 'tail' which makes it a little more compact.
Most of these follow modes are fairly basic they just track GPS and have no sensor based obstacle avoidance the airdog appears to try and do that with software which is better than nothing I suppose. A lot of these machines are based off the open source ardupilot system so adding that sort of thing might well be possible.
I saw this (it was on a cycling blog). There is an alternative as well
http://hexoplus.com/
I agree that dealing with power cables, trees etc will be the challenge. I have a feeling thiese are being "designed" in the American outback, where things over 50cm from the ground are rare...
Another thing I notice about all of these is they advertise it with a camera usually a gopro but that isn't included in the price so you are looking at another 300+ bucks for the go pro. That makes things like the phantom 2 vision+ (http://www.dji.com/product/phantom-2-vision-plus) which has it's own camera + built in 3 axis gimble which is FPV and autopilot capable in the same price range as some of these and that's a very capable machine.
Everyone should have a GoPro though :-) Or two...
A lot of the more affordable drones don't seem to get over to the UK market, or at least not at sensible costs. I'd be quite tempted with one of these (given i already have the camera), but it's finding one that isn't insanely expensive. Ideally (wish-listing time) I'd want one with the autonomy feature, or with the GPS-assisted manual control the DJI Phantom has, as I can see situations where both are useful (though with the autonomous control I struggle to believe that they will follow a bike without smashing into a tree!)
It's relatively simple to build one of these things yourself if you have the time and money. Since multirotors aren't aerodynamic you can make the body with a few bits of wood simple cross style glue 4 brushless motors to the ends add some speed controllers and one of the off the shelf autopilot systems like ardupilot add your preferred modules like gps and compass maybe fpv and some on screen display. Connect a standard battery and transmitter maybe add a 3 axis gimbled camera mount. all that stuff is available in kits and just plugs together. You need to match your motors to speed controller but I've seen places do kits for that and it's not rocket science if the motor needs 30a then you need a speed controller that is rated to that. Making your own is likely a bit cheaper and more flexible than the ready to fly ones. More effort maybe but an option beyond importing one of these ones.
I'm flattered at how much you overestimate my ability to make stuff.
I might be able to cable-tie 2 sticks together in a cross shape. After that I'd rate my chances higher of making a cake that looks like a quadcopter.
hmmm flying cake that follows you around :D
Some small chance of decapitation but that's the price you pay for progress
After watching my mate merrily dick about with a quadcopter in the Borders last week I'm totally going to give this weird branch of geekery a bash. My hubsan X4 shall arrive later in the week.
I've got an x4 it's a nice little quadcopter flys nicely small enough to play with inside but also works ok outside in light to moderate wind and survives crashes pretty well the frame has sort of pop points on the rotor arms where it will pop out rather than snap. It's worth getting a few packs of replacement blades they don't last long and are sometimes hard to find if they go flying off :D
Hubsan do a crash pack for the x4 which has spare blades replacement motors led's and a new body for the thing and a spare battery which is pretty cheap
I got a pack of 5 spare batteries for not very much they only last about 10-15 minutes so it's worth having a few extras. Some places try and sell you higher capacity batteries for more money which aren't really worth it as they don't actually last longer due to the power to weight issue the batteries weigh more so take more thrust to lift so run out faster.