The personal drone that follows and videos you.

[TAZ]

The next Kharashisn family reunion will rain these things from the sky as all the drones collide during the group selfie.

Each day I think society is as screwed as it gets and each day I'm proven wrong.

 

[Younggun]

Yup, M3 walked right into that one....................

I see what you did there

 

[Mike1234567]

Yup, M3 walked right into that one....................

Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "cracked wall nuts"... I mean walnuts.

 

[cpileri]

beats the heck out of a dashboard cam!

 

[vmax]

you know that somewhere, some paparazzi is already using drones

Can you just envision Alec Baldwin going berserk on a drone ?

 

[Mexican_Hippie]

They just used one to send a rescue line to a family trapped in flood waters.

 

[Mike1234567]

They just used one to send a rescue line to a family trapped in flood waters.

Link?

 

[majormadmax]

Link?

Not the same situation, but similar...

Project Ryptide drone flies life-rings to distressed swimmers

 

[Mike1234567]

Not the same situation, but similar...

Project Ryptide drone flies life-rings to distressed swimmers

That's the best use for a drone I think I've ever seen.

 

[Mreed911]

That's the best use for a drone I think I've ever seen.

If you haven't seen the TU Delft proof of concept, it's pretty awesome! Their video is well put together and I could definitely see something like this in use, especially in more suburban/rural areas.

 

[Mike1234567]

If you haven't seen the TU Delft proof of concept, it's pretty awesome! Their video is well put together and I could definitely see something like this in use, especially in more suburban/rural areas.

That's just cool as hell.

 

[TheDan]

If you haven't seen the TU Delft proof of concept, it's pretty awesome! Their video is well put together and I could definitely see something like this in use, especially in more suburban/rural areas.

I like it, and it's totally possible today. I'm sure hospitals or Life Alert and the like are barred from using them because it's commercial use

 

[benenglish]

It's cool but in the circumstances shown it wouldn't be faster. In a location like where that was shot (it seems to be a shopping mall) it's a lot quicker to just grab the defibrillator off the wall.

They should re-do the demo video to show someone in an extremely remote place. Oh, wait, that would probably be beyond the range of the drone and the ability to determine the caller location might not be good enough for anyone to actually find the drone and retrieve it.

OK, how about a demo in a suburban area? There might not be equipment in place and maybe the drone could get it there faster. Unfortunately, that many "maybes" and "mights" are enough to scare away investors.

My take? Intriguing but likely not so generally useful that it will ever be used in exactly that way.

Still, drone delivery is coming. Someone (and it'll probably have to be the government, in order to prevent warring drones in the sky) will have to force the universal adoption of a drone-to-drone communications standard that avoids collisions. When that's done, I imagine the initial drone delivery systems will rely on subscribers who have small landing beacons they deploy when anticipating a delivery. With that sort of help, this sort of thing could work.

Without it, simply expecting a drone to find me when I call a phone number and ask for help or a pizza is, to my mind, further away than most people like to fantasize. Don't get me wrong; I realize the tech almost exists. Heck, those landing beacons could very well be built into our cell phones in a few years.

However, the political and social problems will take much longer to overcome. There will be folks who think they have a right to shoot down anything crossing their land. There will be elite folks who firmly believe that they shouldn't be bothered by the noise and they'll bring political pressure to bear to create "no-fly zones" for "special" people. There will be paparazzi uses that cause public opinion to fly radically in both directions. Finally, someone is going to fly a drone over a big crowd, have a mechanical failure, and kill some kid. When that happens, every fantasy about future drone uses will be set back by years.

 

[Younggun]

Will show up in a Sci Fy movie before long.

 

[TheDan]

the political and social problems will take much longer to overcome.

lol yep... All the derision in this thread is a good example of the social hurdles. The political problems will never be solved

 

[Younggun]

If the gov has to step in to make it work, it will surely spell the end for private drone use for entertainment and fun.

 

[benenglish]

If the gov has to step in to make it work, it will surely spell the end for private drone use for entertainment and fun.

There are going to have to be the equivalent of traffic laws for drones. If private industry can do that without government sanction, that's fine by me. Unfortunately, I've spent enough time with tech folks to know that everybody wants to define their own standards and make them incompatible with everyone else in the vain hope that their standards will rule the market. That almost never happens.

If the government doesn't establish drone air traffic rules then drones will act like the cab drivers in New York. They'll all obey the traffic laws...of whatever country they came from.

It won't be pretty.

 

[TheDan]

Relying on the government to do it is a sure way to make it fail. Multiple industry standards might pop up, but it won't take long for the marketplace to sort out which it wants (betamax, anyone?). The best bet would be for the nerd hive-mind of IEEE to release an RFC for drone collision detection. Of course some brilliant free open source protocol could pop up from the wild that is so simple that everyone just adopts it.

 

[benenglish]

Relying on the government to do it is a sure way to make it fail.

No. Let's be serious, here. Governments don't **** up everything they do. They f up a lot of stuff and they're always inefficient, I'll grant. I'd be happy to see private industry make this work. But private industry manages to screw stuff up just as much as the government does; they just go out of business when they do and we forget about them.

Multiple industry standards might pop up, but it won't take long for the marketplace to sort out which it wants (betamax, anyone?).

Multiple standards WILL pop up, there's no doubt about it. And citing beta doesn't help. The overlap between beta and VHS was a lot longer than most people realize because beta tapes were industry standard for long before and long after VHS came along...though in professional applications.

The best bet would be for the nerd hive-mind of IEEE to release an RFC for drone collision detection.

Bingo. Agreed. Hope it happens.

Of course some brilliant free open source protocol could pop up from the wild that is so simple that everyone just adopts it.

Best of all possible outcomes. HTTP, anyone?

 

[rushthezeppelin]

I got to admit this thing does look rather interesting. As others pointed out this would be kindy nifty to use for gun comps. I'm also looking at it from the perspective of videoing a climber.