Man, it's been a while since I wrote one of these "Drone Week" posts, but there's been some good stuff lately. First up is a comment that that was made by a TechDirt reader on the "Have Drone, Will Travel" post from this week:
Quadcopters are easy to make and cheap because they move the complicated aspects of proper helicopters out of the mechanics and into the elctronice. Usually this is a good strategy - but not here because the side effects of doing this mean that they are unflyable in anything but perfect weather because of the lack of control authority. Since a proper collective pitch micro-helicopter can be purchased for around $100 nowadays ther is no reason to use a quadcopter. For many applications a fixed wing aircraft will be better.
It puzzles me that calling a model aircraft a "drone" somehow makes it a new piece of technology. It isn't - it's just a model aircraft = and in the case of a quadcopter a pretty badly designed one at that!
The author makes a good point, in that the technology being used isn't really that new or innovative. However, I think he misses out that the development of the flight stabilising electronics, as well as the decreased costs of some of the components, have made this hobby much more accessible to the greater public. This in turn has helped drive further innovation and interest in the field, which is never a bad thing.
Next up is the use of drones to track the health of killer whales.
The footage is beautiful, but more important is the reason why they're doing it. Read more here.
Lastly, the Audi Car Drone.
I suppose that as a car, it's not really a drone in the way we might normally think about them, but as a self-driving vehicle on a race track, it's pretty neat. I'd like to see this entered into an actual competition at some point to see how it does against human drivers.
That's it for Drone Week.