Not meaning to interrupt the heated discussion on legality, but i have a logistics question…
These shots were super stable, does anyone know if drone cameras utilize the kind of image stabilization that iOS 8 or Hyperlapse use, or were these image stabilized in post production, or are aerial drones really that rock steady even with wind?
I’d love to see the kind of image stabilization that iOS 8 or Hyperlapse use added to a GoPro as well…as chris farley used to say…that would be awesome!
Depends - there are some professional drones with automatic camera stabilization platforms (similar stuff that full-size helicopters use for filming). It can be done in post-processing too.
Like on cue, Sparkfun has this post about the drone regulations in the US:
I find that a much better course of action than ignoring the rules and hoping you won’t get caught. If FAA can be convinced to adopt sane regulation, it is likely other countries will follow suit - the aeronautical laws tend to be harmonised between countries for commercial reasons.
The stabilizer used is typically a gimbal. Two (in some cases three) brushless motors, an accelerometer or accel-gyro sensor, a controller board. The assemblies I saw plug to the balancing connector on the battery. Move the mountplate, and the camera stays pointed in a fixed direction. (Take care to align the sensor chip properly, or it will get an epileptic fit. Guess how I know.)
I think the camera stabilization toys of this kind, for UAVs, fall (or used to fall) under some laws about military technology. It’s amazing how much of fun toys we have now were military-only or dual-use. The khakibrains who would want them all for themselves must be tearing their hair out of depair of not being able to stop the progress. 
The board I had in hands was not in the pro-class, cost-wise at least. ATmega microcontroller, and (I think) MPU6050 sensor.
I propose a hybrid approach. Attempt to change the rules to be sane, and use common sense and risk-reward analysis (even when its result goes against the rules) meanwhile. That way you can have it both ways. Few things are either-or.
You work with censored data. You have only the got-trouble subset; the got-away-with-it part is way way way bigger.
The fall speed is reduced by poor aerodynamics of the body, unlike the brick. (The props cause unpleasant but ultimately minor lacerations, don’t ask how I know.) Look at the photos of post-crash craft, plentiful on the Net; one would expect much worse damage. I admit I was quite surprised with the survivability of the things.
Not everybody is built to lobby or to beg for permissions. And laws are not something holy; if you want to have respect for them you should never see how they are made. Just do what you wish and know what you are doing. Lobbying is of course a good thing, but a bit too slow for my tastes. I provide some consultations for the paperwork-warriors in some fields, though, but am not built for doing it myself; I prefer dealing with the mother Physics herself, not with some bureaucrats.
And then there are laws that are broken society-wide; from music downloads to smoking weed and beyond. So “it’s a law” is not a major argument, at least not for a very significant segment of the society. “Lawful” and “acceptable” are overlapping sets but neither is a subset of the other.
That depends. I saw a video of comparison of two controllers, reacting to a sudden prop failure on a quad. One tumbled over, the other one just spun along the vertical axis but kept stable with controllable descent rate. I should be able to find it but it would take a while, so on request. This is nothing that would require extra hardware, the magic is in the control algorithms.
That depends. Was likely entirely true in the beginnings.
Why something so dangerous as golf ball is not regulated when comparably safer quads with lower death toll are? We have WAY TOO MANY regulations. I HATE paperwork.
Still pretty rare occurrences, per flight hour; we hear about very many because they got widely reported. Smaller-scale incidents are common, however. Fly a lot in safer area, and get the feel for the machine and where its envelope is. Including running out of batteries mid-flight and other mishaps.
Some data: Youtube search “quadcopter” yields over 1.2 million hits, “quadcopter crash” some 268,000, and there is a small handful of prosecutions. (The hits are biased up by false positives, e.g. university research and promos, and down by not everything being recorded and posted.) The numbers look pretty good to me. Don’t get scared away by overreported improbables.
If the law is lousy, it gets ignored and then it just goes away. See legalization of things ranging from marijuana use to sex toys. Quads will be the same case. You have a chance to be caught, but you also have a chance of slipping on icy stairs and killing yourself. You WILL get caught if you mess up and cause trouble, so whatever you are doing do it well.
I think it’s a bit more complicated than that…
The risk is not only on their part. What about the drone unfortunately standing in the way of an unexpected medical helicopter that just lifted off from a nearby car crash scene, hitting a vital part of the airship and causing it to fall on the ground and kill some people ?
What about a drone being flown in the vicinity of an airport, knowing that planes are landing and departing in some other direction and the drone won’t do harm… Yet, suddenly, an aircraft departs from a runway that was not in use two minutes earlier, surprising the drone’s pilot. Murphy’s law being what it is, there is a reasonable chance that one of the plane’s engines will ingest the device, jeopardizing the safety of everyone on board.
If there are so few aviation accidents, it is because of the insane precautions and regulations applied to flying things. In most countries, for instance, the law goes so far as to stipulate that if you want to organize a firework in the vicinity of an airport, you first need to get a prior written permission and then phone to the airport’s control tower to get their clearance just before starting it. That’s just an example, but I could go on for years writing about the precautions that are taken around the globe as soon as flying is concerned.
All this mainly for one reason : ensuring the safety of the flying public or people that might be on the receiving end of a falling Boeing 737.
If the current trends goes on, there will be an awful lot of people playing with drones. There is a need for regulation. Of course, there will always be people reckless enough to disregard the law. That can’t be prevented. Yet, saying that the increasing number of drones operations doesn’t need some thinking about the possible consequences and defining some rules is, pardon me, a bit silly.
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