Tag: Flying

I can remember when I was in grade school. On free days in gym, the coach would give us a bunch of paper and we would see who could build the plane that flew the longest.

A little while back we talked a bit about the very cool looking Kyosho iOS controlled helicopter from Japan that had surfaced. The thing reminds me a lot of the Parrot AR.Drone in a smaller and cheaper form.

The SEED is an autonomous, mobile camera balloon created to take photos and video of you while you’re on vacation, but I honestly see a lot of Big Brother implications. It also reminds me of the Kinos in Stargate Universe.

The guys at the ETH – the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have the best jobs on the planet. Not only do they get to play with flying quadrocopters all the time, and have built a special arena just for doing so, they’ve now got them flying using gesture control.

This 20-foot dirigible replica was made by Jack Clemens and it took him two and a half years to build. Apparently his cat destroyed his first model. It goes to show you that cats can be vindictive!

Got a couple of fancy quadrocopters floating around? Why not teach them some cheap tricks – like how to juggle balls. The guys from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich are up to their flying quadrocopter shenanigans again.

I’ve heard my share of horror stories of people dropping their iPhone 4 out of their pocket and having the screen shatter on impact. That’s why I was amazed when I read about this iPhone 4 which was accidentally dropped out of an airplane – and survived with nary a scratch.

Man has been flying for a very long time and early in the development of aircraft, we tired designs that mimicked birds with flapping wings and things never worked out well. The cool part about birds and insects that we still can’t fully recreate in man-made aircraft is the amount of lift and propulsion they can generate with small surface area wings.

Next time you see a giant bird flying through the skies, you might want to double-check that it’s the real deal. You could be looking a remote-controlled fake.

If you’ve ever dreamed of capturing high-altitude flight videos, you probably thought that would be something you could only do with an expensive UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) like the $30,000+ Draganflyer X8. Well, thanks to the guys at Team BlackSheep, you could be flying high for as little as $2000 bucks.

When I think about DARPA building robots, I envision something along the line of the Terminator or Johnny 5. That isn’t what DARPA has in mind though (at least in this project) as one of its projects has hit the prototype operation phase.

I have tried my hand at flying remote control helicopters a few times. Once the copter flew away never to be seen again. I suspect this was a response to seeing how poorly I landed my RC plane.

Riding in a helicopter can be a thrilling, and sometimes harrowing experience. But this helicopter design is one that I can say that with certainty that I would never, ever set foot inside of.

Every time I visit CES, I like to dig around looking for something other than the usual big-brand announcements, and this year is no exception. My favorite off-the-beaten-path thing of the year so far? The ID-1SWAT copter from RotorConcept.

If I had a Quadrocopter remote-controlled flying aircraft floating around my place, I’m not sure this is the first thing I’d do with it. But it is the holidays, and I guess the joyful Christmas spirit is strong with the guys who programmed their Quadrocopter to play a little festive holiday tune.

Microsoft’s Kinect proves that some gaming peripherals aren’t just for gaming. Since the launch of Microsoft’s Kinect, people have been hacking it to do all sorts of  interesting things. However, I have to say that attaching it to a flying robot has to be one of the coolest I’ve seen.