Tag: Flying

There’s just something inherently cool about flying quadrotors. But I have to say this is the first time I’ve seen this many of the crafts flying in unison. Using a veritable army of flying nano-quadrotors from KMel Robotics, Alex Kushleyev, Daniel Mellinger and Vijay Kumar of the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab sent a team of tightly-coordinated to the skies in their lab.

I have spent my share of time flying around the Swann original quad copters, and they are a ton of fun. The little helicopters are made for flying indoors and are small enough that you can have fun even in a small apartment.

When the Parrot AR.Drone was released, it was supposed to be piloted from an iPhone or Android smartphone. However, that didn’t gel with some users since it’s not as precise as they’d like. Serious AR.Drone geeks have thought about using a game controller from their favorite video game, or even better, a flight-simulator joystick, and have put together various hacks to make this happen.

Who’d have thought that flying robots could someday create buildings? But as crazy as it sounds, our quadrotor-loving friends over at the Swiss Federal Institute Institute of Technology already have proven it’s possible.

Yves Rossy, the flying Swiss maniac, has appropriately called himself Jetman, and I have to say that his moniker is well deserved, because that thing strapped to his back just looks plain dangerous. His latest stunt?

Are you one of those guys who loves to buy those expensive model planes and then wreck it on the maiden voyage? Maybe it’s time to forget remote control planes and get into the cockpit. Of a simulator of course.

Ah, insect drones. They’ve been used so much in movies and televisions shows that it was bound to become a reality someday. I remember this particular scene in that old Richie Rich movie (the one where Macaulay Culkin played Richie), when Professor Kean Bean was showing off his latest invention to Richie: a gold flying bug that was equipped with a camera.

Robots are taking our jobs, sure, but look at that image. They are also taking our humans. This guy went willingly, but one day they will join together just like these little helicopters and carry us away while our limbs flail helplessly.

This unusual spherical flying machine was developed by the Japanese Ministry of Defense. It’s the first of its kind and is remote-controlled.

There’s only a couple of days before Halloween, so if you haven’t already picked out your costume, you might want to get it together now. If you happen to be a fan of Inspector Gadget, here’s a fun idea to bring that costume to life.

In the world of high-end cameras for shooting movies and video, the RED brand is at the top. These cameras are so awesome that they are what major directors are now using to film Hollywood blockbusters.

What you see in the photos here is one of those rare items that is at the same time both awesome and supremely stupid. The man you see here is from China and is named Shu Mansheng.

This new thrill-seeking robot actually base-jumps. That’s right, a robot seeking thrills and showing off. It will climb up the side of a building, then jump off and deploy a paraglider to fly back down to Earth.

I have a thing about heights. I am not scared of heights really, I have no issue flying in an airplane or helicopter. What I have an issue with is being up high and having nothing between me and death but a rail or less.

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.