Filed under: Accessories, Software, iPhone
Found Footage: Control an unmanned aerial vehicle with an iPhone
What does a former US Navy F/A-18 Hornet pilot do with her time now that she heads MIT's Humans and Automation Lab? The short answer is "really cool stuff," and the long answer is even better.
During her tenure as a pilot, Professor Cummings became frustrated with the Hornet's cockpit. "I spent whole time complaining - who was the moron who designed this thing?" she told Wired. At MIT, she and her students were inspired to consider a replacement for the huge controllers that US soldiers use to operate Raven unmanned aerial vehicles. Just six weeks and $5,000 later, they launched a working test flight of a small robotic crafted controlled by an iPhone.
The app they've created relays GPS coordinates to the robot, which then travels from origin to destination on its own. Wired notes that the phone in the video is not jailbroken and the app in question was created like any other. It's very cool indeed. Now if they could only design something to get my kids to the bus stop on time.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
evantravers said 4:30PM on 8-10-2009
Where can I buy one of those helicopters? I'm always frustrated with the goofy ones that you see on the internet all the time.. I'd love to have a good one.
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Pierre said 5:56PM on 8-10-2009
http://www.draganfly.com has some great ones
josh said 5:00PM on 8-10-2009
I guess this is really what you call Flight Control...
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Rube said 9:47PM on 8-10-2009
Ha! This was my old engineering professor from Virginia Tech! I guess she's moved up in the world over at MIT...
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Steve A. said 11:47PM on 8-10-2009
This is nothing new. Some one has already used an iPhone to control a TRex 450SE v1 RC Heli a few months ago. In fact, even though the video was posted in late Apr., I believe that he actually recorded it late last year.
He calls it FliPhone. He is way ahead of this MIT professor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72V0n1GaMsw
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aaadad said 12:22AM on 8-11-2009
this is a pretty stupid article considering a real Raven is 10 times bigger than this tiny toy helicopter and has a range of 15 miles....
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patrick.william.walker said 12:31PM on 8-11-2009
I really would like to do this stuff, and have some skills to do it on the cheap. Anyone ever get the TIVCP driver to work under Mac OS X to communicate with a TUSB3410?
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