Three UAS on retractable dog leashes fly overhead, capturing live aerial video of the all the faces gaping from auditorium seats below. Welcome to TED 2014.The leashes are held by Sergei Lupshin, the Zurich-based roboticist who invented these tethered quadcopters. He calls them Fotokites, and the idea is to show that a leash can completely change the nature of a UAS.
Attaching a leash to an unmanned aerial vehicle eliminates the need for special piloting skills, he says. What’s more, this makes it easier to hold someone accountable for whatever the drone is doing. The tether takes the anonymity out of aerial surveillance.
“It’s like a kite, so the safety situation is very different,” Lupshin assured the audience before launching the UAS over their heads at TED, the annual ideas conference that got under way today in Vancouver, Canada.
Fotokites use standard dog leashes, Lupshin says. But thanks to software on board the Fotokites, the UAS always fly at the same angle relative to their “pilots,” no matter where that person moves, allowing for steady control over photos and video shot from above. He demonstrates this dog-like behaviour by walking around the stage as the three UAS follow.
Lupshin, a postdoc at the University of Zurich’s Robotics and Perception Group and a TED Fellow, envisions these Fotokites as an especially useful tool for journalists. He opened his brief talk with aerial photos taken at massive street demonstrations in Russia in 2011 to protest the election process. From the air, he said, the huge scale of the protests was undeniable. “It’s just not possible to consider this event insignificant.”
But UAS photography has traditionally required skill and practice, he says. The protest pictures were taken by a group of Russian UAS-photography aficionados called AirPano. One UAS pilot wore a bright orange vest emblazoned with a request that onlookers wait until the UAS had landed to ask questions. That, Lupshin said, showed just how hard it can be to fly a UAS untethered: “This is a very high barrier of entry to access this unique perspective.”
In addition to journalists, Lupshin sees everyone from firefighters to archeologists using Fotokites. The leashed UAS could provide aerial photos of a fossil dig, for instance. Weighing in at just about a pound, they do seem easy to take just about anywhere. Lupshin fit three Fotokites inside a small briefcase that he brought on stage before launching them over the conference audience.
A consumer version of Fotokite is slated to go on sale by the end of 2014.
Source: Wired