Amazon's IoT Hacking Contest Won By Voice-Controlled Drone (thenewstack.io)

An anonymous reader writes: On Thursday, Amazon announced the winners of its first-ever "AWS IoT Mega Contest," a competitive hardware hacking event held in conjunction with Hackster last month which drew nearly a thousand participants. First place went to an RFID, infrared, light and sound sensor system that gathers data about a sleeping baby and to a voice-controlled drone that sends radio signals using a Raspberry Pi board. "IoT is here now," posted an Amazon cloud evangelist, just four months after Amazon released their own Internet of Things platform. "People are building devices, sites, and applications that are sophisticated and useful."

Comments

How does that work?

[cablepokerface]

You just say: "hey drone, go hack IoT devices!" and then it does so really well?

Re: How does that work?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the hacking contests mean they give a team X time to create something while there, which means the winning teams plan a project ahead of time, and assemble it there, so they can say "look how awesome we are for doing this from scratch in X time"

Re: How does that work?

[WarJolt]

Right. Because if you don't already have the drone assembled how do you know you have all the parts?

Plus Amazon already has an Alexa api and one of the target applications for IoT is Prime air, so isn't this biased?

Re:How does that work?

[Anonymous Coward]

He's asking what hack means... and he got a 2 score. (O_O)

Gee... What a coincidence...

[__aaclcg7560]

Would this entry have won the contest if Amazon wasn't working on a drone delivery program?

Of course...

[Junta]

Reading both, I can't help but to feel that Amazon services are crammed in, regardless of value.

In the drone case, at least in the US all the AWS and echo do is shamelessly plug Amazon, without providing value. In the US, private flyers must have line of sight anyway, so going over the internet is not exactly that interesting except for gratuitous plug for Amazon. Besides, barking orders to a drone seems like the least fun and least practical approach to operating it (though also showing the least sensitivity to latency, since the latency is so terrible in such a scheme to start with).

In the baby case, again the internet is not actually that relevant for a family wanting to study their own child, since they are actually living with the baby, the round trip out to Amazon and back is again gratuitous use of AWS. I particularly thought it was interesting when they reluctantly mentioned Amazon SNS, but with a disclaimer that effectively says that would be a bad idea compared to a more robust and cheaper local alerting design (i.e. 'not intended to replace a baby monitor'). In this example, one *could* imagine extending the reach of academic research more conveniently into the homes of study participants, but that might be viewed a little more creepy, hence the focus on the mostly useless incorporation of the internet to this use case.

It all highlights what makes me groan about 'Internet of Things', the very wording suggests they aren't sure exactly what they want to do, but they know we can make small enough chips/radios/antennas/sensors/batteries to put them on 'things', and some way or another we are going to find practical applications with that, come hell or high water. It's a technology-first push, rather than focused on nice and productive ways that are enabled by the technology. Of course we've long lived with such things in the industry (e.g. a huge part of supercomputing is a race who can calculate arbitrary linear algebra problems fastest, rather than talking about the real problems addressed), but the open endedness of 'things' is a new low.

Re:Of course...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called the bend over of things and bring plenty of lube, it will hurt.

Re:Of course...

[WoOS]

Well, I also wondered what Amazon's Cloud was doing in the drone example (see this figure from the cited article). It turns out it does the voice recognition (apparently with Amazon's "Alexa" service).

BTW, the drone article (didn't read the babyphone one) gives a step-by-step instruction how to setup the different programs. Could be useful also to others wanting to use speech recognition for whatever. Although, given the example phrases in the article such as "Alexa talk to Drone”, “Command Launch”, “Go forward 10 feet” (especially the last one) I wonder whether Alexa can do grammar or whether one has to generate a new command for each different amount of feet to move.

Re:Of course...

[Junta]

But do we really need that for speech to text? We've had speech to text for a long time for such restricted vocabularies on systems that the Pi would put to shame. The commands sound like a pretty simple command set, so not so much natural language processing going on.

In a world where we have 2-3 watt processors that blow away what 120W processors could do when we first started seeing commercially viable speech to text. it seems an odd time to start acting like the client device is hopelessly incapable of doing anything but being a dumb pipe to send stuff to 'the cloud' to do the real work.

Instead we gleefully praise an infrastructure where you forever rent day to day capability, never owning the capability. It's a service provider wet dream, extreme lock in with a subscription income.

How It Works

[Anonymous Coward]

A groundstation(MAVLink) transmitter that communicates with the drone, is connected to a Raspberry Pi that runs mavproxy, a Python script that takes drone control commands and sends them to the drone.

The Raspberry Pi also runs a script that connects to the IoT service which acts as a bridge to the Amazon Echo(Alexa) voice controlled speaker. Voice commands are translated by Echo into text based commands(forward, turn, stop, distance...) fed through Amazon IoT to the Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi then tells the drone to go 'forward 5 meters' or 'return to home/land'.

It's a cool hack. Even if the command chain is approaching Rube Goldberg levels.

It does give the neophite a view into the possibilities of Amazon's drone delivery command and control system. Dispatch would be just this easy. Now all they have to do is reliable on-board collision avoidance and safe landing zone identification. After that, it's just a question of horsepower, longevity, and regulation.

Re:How It Works

[Junta]

Except those directives aren't really adequate for anything but a gimmick. They don't really scale up to an autonomous flying delivery drone, nor would it accurately show how a remote operator would really be operating if not autonomous (it's tons more efficient to do controller based input to such a system that can only understand basic directives).

Per the video, the drone is probably not even following the instructions accurately. For example, the drone drifts, rather than holding position, probably because there was some breeze. Meaning it probably doesn't judge location or anything, and instead hardcodes assumptions about how long to run certain motors to acheive X degree turns, Y meters of flight.

It's a fun little hack, but could have all been done inside the Pi, without pulling in Amazon infrastructure. So it's a bit eye-roll worthy to me to tack that on for the sake of a corporate sponsorship of an event. I would have rather seen projects that pull in remote services for some meaningful purpose than just saying you pulled them in. The challenge being is that quck hacks are rarely going to need something that AWS provides that local horsepower can't provide (even 'embedded' processors are overwhelmingly capable). It could incorporate the locality of the data, and the baby nap thing could plausibly claim to enable people to conduct otherwise impractical studies, but the drone doesn't do that either.

Security?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm assuming that none of the entries have any security protection against being taken over for nefarious purposes. IoT, not for me!

Useful things?

[Anonymous Coward]

If people are using this to build "useful things", the why don't you show those, instead of a helicopter parent enablement device and a useless drone?

WIFI != Intnernet

[Ashenkase]

So, the voice commands went through the wifi router, over the intertubes and ended up at the drone? Where is the "internet" in this "internet of things" drone?

Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hack

[citizenr]

I guess this was that famous Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon Iv been hearing about.

Important government announcement

[Anonymous Coward]

There is currently no evidence linking interest in electronics with RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM. As far as we know. Sincerely, the FAA.