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Fair is fair; you can build one yourself:
http://diydrones.com/

I just got the lovely thought of milipolice/civilian drones dogfighting above the cities. Wanna bet that sites like diydrones.com become illegal to view in the US the first time a citizen's drone shoots down a militarily-armed police drone?

BigBrothers budget is set to fall.

Fair is fair; you can build one yourself:
http://diydrones.com/

Whooosh. Extremely ignorant and unintelligent comment. Its doubtful he added his own wages to the cost. Meaning, only an absolute fucking moron adds their day job labor rates when they calculate the cost of a DIY project.

On the other hand, it was asked of me to make one for someone else. Accordingly, by world standard, it is extremely reasonable for me to ask for compensation since it is now a work for hire. Its literally disgusting I have so explain such basic concepts here on slashdot these days.

What do you mean you don't work for free?!?! Duhhhh! What do you mean you don't bill yourself for hobby projects?!? Duhhhhh!

It would be very reasonable to assume that this researcher spent a week on fine-tuning and construction, no?

Holy shit the average IQ on slashdot is dumber than a bag of hammers these days. Most of the work is already done. The cost of carbon fiber is much cheaper than all the extra electronics required of most of these drones. You can build one of these drones for roughly $500. Which means, its extremely reasonable to state you can construct his project (which I've seen several times before by others anyways) for roughly the same money.

Literally the responses to my comment only highlights the general ignorance and stupidity of the slashdot masses these days.

Those of you who think you know what you are talking about are really pissing off those of us who do. Sadly, the former is the majority of slashdot these days.

Sounds like what 98% of all quadcopter hobbyists encounter daily.

And we are giving 100K+ grants to these colleges to do R&D on stuff that industries experts like Ascending/Aerovironment/Dragam/Microdrone have been doing for ages. On both cheap and expensive scale. With all the super-universities teams working on acrobatic in a close spaced with motion capture systems, why not have some R&D in wind-resistance? Motor fail-over? Wireless comnunications? No one is really doing hardcore research in that topic, aside from the hobby community and that's what everyone is really asking for....

Looks more fun. Story should have said, College students buy a quadcopter, velcro a set of sensors to record to an SD card and fly it in a swarm of bats to get the sensor readings.

Actually 2 years back a quadcopter were flying in the same hall using LIDAR. I think I found a price of ~$5000 for the units they used, but my memory might be an order of magnitude wrong.

You can get along way with 2D images, a lot further than you think, of course with this tech it's easier.

It's probably not a question of who may see it, but how much it cost. The gov't (and therefore we) pay a small fortune for every one of these innovative new devices deployed. It's definitely worth while for the gov't to want to go collect a stolen unit, rather than just ordering a new one. According to the USAF, that item cost approximately $173,000

That's a single system cost with bulk discounts. An individual aircraft is much cheaper (?) at only $35,000. That's still far too much considering what's in them - your government could make substantial savings if they hung out on diydrones.com and built their own drones.

A single Raven costs about $35,000 and the total system costs $250,000. The RQ-11B Raven UAV weighs about 1.9 kg (4.2 lb), has a flight endurance of 60–90 minutes and an effective operational radius of approximately 10 km (6.2 miles).

Not really that new.... Home made UAV is easy and have been built by amateurs for years now....

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9980 this works FANTASTIC as a UAV brains. spookly good.

Plus you can get a drone model that looks 100% identical to the Military version. Give a guy a couple grand and he can easily build a real UAV with PTZ camera, control with GPS waypoints and why build custom RF for comms... use a frigging cellphone, I could talk to the UAV via cellular communication channels across the country.

http://diydrones.com/ is a good start for info as well...

http://www.diydrones.com/

http://code.google.com/p/arducopter

These are apparently better for use indoors as they can't tolerate much wind. Chris Anderson from DIYdrones (and WIRED), has reviewed them

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/review-of-the-production

In fact, there are several. Aside from an RC plane of some sort, all you need is about $100 in parts and some electronics know-how to build your own (basic) UAV.

Of course, it won't be as sophisticated as a multi-million dollar micro-UAV or one of the Air Force's Predator drones, but medium range (several miles) surveillance, automated take-offs and landings, GPS waypoint tracking, infrared cameras, etc. are not outside the realm of the hobbyist.

Check out http://www.diydrones.com/ to see what I mean.

Or get your hands dirty with some DIY Drones?

Oh! - looks like somebody has already done it: http://www.wonderhowto.com/wonderment/flying-drone-captures-360-interactive-view-gulf-oil-spill-0117314/

If former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, a former telecom exec, could not figure out his satphones needed to be charged to work in the days before Katrina, well, what are the odds you'd get satphones charged in the 3rd world?

Instead, until http://www.jpaerospace.com/ perfects the aerostat station, build a series of Sky Pup-based http://skypup.wikispaces.com/ really cheap drones with Arduino-type autopilots http://diydrones.com/profiles/blog/show?id=705844:BlogPost:35640 and huge honkin' loudspeakers.

The Hawaii wing of the Civil Air Patrol uses manually-piloted Cessna 172s for the same mission, but Cessnas and pilot training are both spendy, whereas Sky Pups can be locally produced with minimal tools.

I'm complaining that FAA severe regulations for radio control UAVs are absolutely stupid.

Milspec GPS? Naah... enhanced good enough. See http://diydrones.com/ for more.

This kind of technology, though not as polished is becoming available to the masses. Here is a good example - http://diydrones.com/

Simple open source auto pilots are now available, low cost GPS systems are available, RC air components are readily available. The point is that even the simple systems that are currently available wouldn't need much tweaking for use in some sinister way.

Try http://diydrones.com/profiles/blog/show?id=705844%3ABlogPost%3A788. It seems relatively current, and offers some GPL'd software and lots of links.

This is a bit outdated, possibly a dead project, but it was cool when it was new and going on. Check out http://members.shaw.ca/sonde/ [High Altitude Glider Project]. Might be enough interesting pieces there to continue a similar project, or at least contact the original site-owner and ask him a few questions to get you started.

Almost everything you need ready-made.

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blog/show?id=705844%3ABlogPost%3A44814

Acually making your own UAV is actually fairly simple.

http://diydrones.com/

Using a arduino or a gumstix running linux for a super high power UAV has been happening in the robotics and RC aircraft arena for some time now.

I guess doing what others have done but adding "with a iphone" is the new "on the internet".

I hate to hijack the first comment like this, but I just want to point out, for anyone interested there is a pretty large community here dedicated to providing information on building UAVs.

While it certainly isn't the easiest thing in the world to do, with processing speed and efficiency increasing, as well as things like modern GPS and other sensors, UAVs really are easy enough for your average electronics/computer geek to build, given around $1000 and some free time.

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/iphone-datalogging-with-a

DIY Drones: amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and open-source Predators.

We run an open source UAV community at DIYDrones. We fly under RC rules (under 400 feet, etc) and our aircraft (fixed wing and helis) are typically under 3-4 pounds. We even have some UAVs with Lego Mindstorms autopilots!

Given that these are basically toys created by amateurs, it's going to be really hard to regulate them. That's why we want the FAA to create a de minimus regulatory category (under 3 pounds, under 1,000 feet, away from built-up areas, airports, etc), similar to what the FCC did with open access wireless spectrum. Otherwise, we're going to completely kill innovation in the independent commercial sector by creating an impossible regulatory burden.

Yes, making a UAV is not trivial, but neither is it incredibly difficult. There are plenty of cheap parts out there that, with a little programming, could tie together a small GPS module and aircraft control servos.

More info at http://diydrones.com/