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Inside Chris Anderson's Open-Source Drone Factory
the_newsbeagle writes "The former editor of Wired is betting that the 21st century skies will be filled with drones, and not the military sort. His company, 3D Robotics, is building open-source UAVs for the civilian market, and expects its drones to catch on first in agriculture. As noted in an article about the company's grand ambitions: 'Farms are far from the city's madding crowds and so offer safe flying areas; also, the trend toward precision agriculture demands aerial monitoring of crops. Like traffic watching, it's a job tailor-made for a robot: dull, dirty, and dangerous.' Also, farmers apparently wouldn't need FAA approval for privately owned drones flying over their own property."
Whatever the fate of this particular company, it's pretty clear to me that most (or all?) farming jobs can be automated with a combination of current machinery, sensors and some reliable software. I predict a world where several hectares of farmland will be simply monitored by each "farmer". Automatic combine harvesters are already a reality. Drone surveillance is near. Pest control? Can't see why not. A complete automatic milking system which lovingly cares for each cow? Maybe 30 years.
A system where animals to be slaughtered never see a human face? Don't be shocked, it's coming.
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His factory is a joke.
They don't ship product on time, they claim to have shipped things they don't, and they pretty much lie at every turn when you deal with their customer support. Their website claims items in stock that aren't, and claims items out of stock that get shipped.
I made repeated calls and met with repeated lies.
This pattern is repeated time and time again by others than myself on their forums.
When you want to actually get your product you have to post a rant online on their forms, twitter and other social media sites ... then all of the sudden, mysteriously your package will be shipped with stuff they said they wouldn't have for a week ... of course this is already 2 weeks after they claimed to have shipped it over night ... given you a tracking number that still claims FedEx hasn't been picked up.
I eventually got my package about 3 weeks after placing an over nighted order for things the website (AND customer support by phone) claimed they had in stock. Even FedEx seemed a little irate that I'd been giving a tracking number for an overnight package that was entered in their system for pickup and hadn't been picked up in 2 weeks when I spoke to them.
Chris Anderson is a blowhard loud mouth that has almost nothing at all to do with 3d robotics other than his name, and thats a good thing, cause its a shitty company that appropriated GPL'd code for its own profit, which would be fine, if it weren't such a shitty company.
He's just riding on other peoples work like he does everywhere. He has basically no actual involvement with the company other than claiming CEO and using his name to drum up investment funding for his coffers. Half the time it doesn't even appear that he knows what his company actually does, and I doubt for an instant that he's ever held the controls of one of his drones.
Fuck 3d robotics and Chris Anderson, its a horrible company to do business with and deserves to die a painful death. Stay far far away.
ArduPilot rocks. 3d Robotics sucks ass in every conceivable way.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Heh, you should look at what ArduPilot is capable of.
Anyone can own a fully autonomous vehicle, be it land, sea or air. ArduPilot/ArduCopter/ArduRover will fly/sail/drive pretty much anything, fully autonomous, with waypoints automatically or using remote control telemetry. It can live track a target (using GPS data from a ground station) or carry out a mission like a 'bomb drop' all on its own.
I drop water balloons from mine on my dogs for fun and games, they love it, I've only done a couple fully autonomous missions, but it most certainly will fly its course and do what its told and do it exactly where it was supposed to. I've been unable to get it to drop a water balloon down my chimney, but it hits within about 6 feet EVERY TIME.
That is MORE than accurate enough to do damage.
Fun however, is first person view obstacle course races with a couple friends. All the thrill of flying an airplane through places you shouldn't, and some serious risk when you consider that you could lose $1,000 worth of autopilot and camera gear. The quads themselves are cheap, mine is custom built now, if you exclude the autopilot itself, camera gear and radios, the quad is actually cheaper than any of my other RC aircraft.
Its also the one with the shortest range and lowest payload.
These autopilots now days may not rival military tech, but they are so close that it makes me want them to bring back GPS dithering almost. This thing could EASILY be made into a lot of death.
Of course, so can a truck full of fertilizer if you know what you're doing. Except this thing will fly itself to the target while you drive the other direction. Thats the scary part.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Farmers most certainly would require FAA approval for using their own drones.
You can not use an ariel vehicle (ANY ariel vehicle) for commercial purposes in the US with a waiver or certificate of air worthiness.
Doing work for your farm would most certainly be commercial, even if you don't sell the product itself. Research alone can be commercial.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
A lot of people are getting excited about what drone can do in agriculture. Folks on the diydrones forum, when they find out my brother and I actually are farmers, get all excited to try to solve problems for us. The problem is, it's going to take a lot of work to make drones useful in agriculture. I attended a presentation recently by an professor specializing in remote sensing and agriculture. She uses satellites, planes, and drones to try to get useful data from crops. It would be really handy to determine crop disease or monitor moisture use, etc.
Turns out, though, these are very hard problems, and small UAVs are actually making it harder in the short term. Here's why. A UAV map of a field, typically is done at low altitude, but stitching together thousands of high res images taken as the aircraft passes back and forth across the field in a pattern. Stitching is done using standard image algorithms that try to identify common pixels to line things up. The problem with this is that the very process of stitching the images changes the data. Is this pixel really this color of green, or did it get changed to fit in better (exposure adjusted)? Also the crop looks very different when you pass over it one way vs another way. For example a silk rug changes color if you view it from a different angle or rub your hand across the nap. This becomes a problem with UAV mapping because the resolution is so high, and the number of pixels is so great. With satellite imagery stitching doesn't really enter into it.
And once you get your image, what does it mean? I see some dark spots. Are these individual plants, rocks, dirt clumps, or shadows? Or is it horrible disease? And even if you can detect a difference in the crop's NDVI pixel values, that does that mean? Is the plant just dry? Soil is naturally poorer? Or is disease. Sometimes disease shows up very clearly in an NDVI map taken from a drone. But in the end a human really has to walk the fields anyway, and take samples.
So the field (no pun intended) of UAV imagery is just getting started. I believe it will do cool things, but we have to be patient as we address the inherent problems with stitching, and also develops a means of understanding and exploring the data (google maps zooming for farmers' fields!).
For me the number one thing I'd like to get from UAV imagery would be accurate 3-d mapping of the topography for drainage purposes.
For right now, it's an expensive toy for some farmers to play with (UAV mapping and agronomy companies), and a project for researchers. And for me, UAVs are just a fun hobby.
Perhaps it wouldn't be completely infeasible to consider a large fixed-wing model aircraft (like a C-130 model?) programmed to autonomously land on an aircraft carrier? One nice and stable and stationary, like in Norfolk Naval Yard? With an onboard video camera transmitting to an external recorder of course, since the Navy probably wouldn't have much of a sense of humor about this sort of thing and you might not want to ask for it back.
Sure would make for a hell of a Youtube video though :-)
Not that I'm suggesting anyone try anything like that, of course, having no wish to visit Guantanamo (despite the friendly moose).