Toy Request

One of the podcasts had a story about a remote helicopter with a camera on it. Live streaming video to your laptop. Nice, but who the hell can fly those things? I need an auto pilot that flies that thing from start to finish and just takes verbal commands like "Take off. Fly over there. hover. Up 5 meters. Come back home and land." let me know when you have one of those. I'm sure the military and law enforcement would like  them too. This is a niche waiting to be filled.

The military has a bunch of options for RC aircraft with cameras. I remember a quote "It is like having a marine that is a hundred meters tall with a pare of binoculars." Sounds useful. The device I'm thinking of was just thrown by one marine and flown by a simple remote with a screen in it.When you wanted to land it, you just kind of crashed it in to something soft. There were no landing gear, just a ruggedized bottom. They must know jar-heads.

There is a Myth Busters that shows the guys trying to fly an RC helicopter. They also got a little trainer chopper that was basically designed to crash a million times and just put back together. The tech guy played with a simulator and still had a great deal of trouble with the chopper. They never did appear to get the chopper to fly properly.

I've tried my hand at flying a chopper on the nervous-child setting (really easy) and still had a difficult time not crashing. It is just plane hard. I've heard it compared to standing on a board on a boiling ball and trying to get work done while people are shooting at you. Well, that was flying a chopper in combat.

There are some videos on YouTube of RC choppers with firearms attached. This just worries the hell out of me. Those things go hey-wire on the drop of a hat. I can just see someone demoing their new military grade assault RC Avenging Angle 9000 when someone gets a phone call on the wrong band. I picture this chopper doing going Death Blossom on a bunch of VIPs thinking of funding the project.

The gun thing has bad idea written all over it. The camera thing sounds really useful. You can inspect properties for squatters. There are any number of security uses for one of these things. Even low level sports at the collage and high-school level could benefit from something like this. Drug dealers could use them to keep an eye on the cops. Peeping-toms will be the early adopters. They will help work out the bugs before legitimate users turn up.

I want to take a bunch of footage of the racers. The preserve across the street would be a great place to do some low fly over at sun set sorties. Then there are any 100 things I would like to film at Faire. Some might take an infrared camera. That shouldn't be a chore. I'm sure I could think of some other cool stuff too.

There will be so many of these things in the air, they will need collision control. This is something that regular aircraft could use too. They will need spacial awareness so they do not fly straight in to a wall or pole. They will need to be regulated so they do not interfere with regular air travel. Aside from privacy, I think they should be band from flying low over private property without express permission of the owners.  This law should be written from a safety stand point, not a privacy one. No one is going to have anything resembling privacy in a couple years.