Barmaleikin, а у тебя уже есть такой и ты летал уже?
Поговорить об этом пока не хочу, потому что прочитал на Амазоне такой отзыв:
It was really love at first sight when I saw the first CES videos of the AR-Drone in January 2010. It reminded me on that one scene in Terminator 3 where they had one of small Skynet drones in a lab with scientists working on it... I wanted to have one - even at $1.000. I already owned a Hirobo Lama RC coax helicopter at that time and was very familiar with the problems of getting a device like that hovering stable or even flying it at all. The AR-Drone seemed to do all that automatically which is not only pretty cool but also extremely useful if you lose control of your helicopter. You would just take your hands of the controls and it stays where it is! The original idea was to start a little R&D project using the iPhone as an intermediate step and control the drone from a computer and let it automatically fly around the house from point A to B to C. Well, at this point it won't quite happen yet.
The manufacturer has built extremely high expectations by showing numerous product videos on Youtube. One particular video shows two players driving two drones through the woods out of direct eye sight just using the iPhone video display. That's purely science fiction: frame rate and video latency/delay simply don't allow you doing that.
The Wi-Fi signal indicator bar either shows 4/5 or nothing at all. DYI programmers on a web forum have now revealed that we are looking at a static picture rather than an actual indicator. The drone is actually supposed to go in auto hover mode as soon as it loses the Wi-Fi connection of if you receive a call on your iPhone. Well, we see quite a number of reports where a drone out of range flew off like a rocket! 45° angel at maximum speed until the battery is dead. You'd be more than lucky to find what's left of your done again in a distance of 3 miles and that it doesn't crash into someone. At any rate: faking the signal strength display in a case like that where it really matters is just reckless IMHO.
The automatic start procedure works nice and flawless. You just hit the <ascent> button and the machine rises to 2ft height and stays more or less in position. The auto descent however is less impressive at all. "Soft" as they state in their product copy is definitely different. It almost drops like a rock over the last 2". That should work much smoother. They might want to get that fixed in a software update sooner or later.
What really differentiates the AR-Drone from other RCs out there (beside the Wi-Fi / iPhone control) is it's built in stabilization system: you get an accelerometer, 2 gyros, an ultrasound altimeter and a video camera facing downwards feeding an real time image processor to see if you are drifting in either direction. The image processor needs a contrast rich and rather bright picture (ground, floor) to work. The more texture the better. It didn't work at all on my industrial style concrete floor although it has some light gray textures it. The drone drifted 8"/sec. Using it on a colorful carpet it worked better. Looking at the CES videos on youtube again I started to realize that the manufacturer had been using a carpet showing aerial photography at their well illuminated booth. All the roof tops, hedges and streets on that carpet provided a great texture and rich contrast for the image processor to work - now I don't want to put fancy carpet all around my house to use the drone.
The ultrasound altimeter works perfectly fine on even surfaces. The system keeps the altitude at a constant level even when flying across a sofa or a table. The drone surges up to keep the constant distance. Keep that in mind when approaching a 2.9ft table at an altitude of 5.5ft: It will surge up to 8.4ft and bump right into the ceiling. Same story flying outdoor over a hedge or garage. Heights add up. I also had random heights going over grass and hedges due to poor ultrasound reflection.
The brushless motors are getting extremely hot - too hot IMO. I would not recommend flying longer than the promised battery life of 12 minutes. That's actually quite common for all sorts of RC models with this type of engines.
The lipo battery that comes with it is supposed give you 12min flight time at 1.5h to recharge it. I couldn't get more than 8min out of it even after recharging it for the fourth time. The battery charger isn't explained anywhere in the manual. It's got 5 LEDs. I got it blinking red/green after each recharging process. Only after unplugging and charging it again I got a stable green light from it.
The EEP (styrofoam like) elements do have quite fragile bridges. The indoor hull won't survive any medium crash. It does the job protecting the propellers and everything else from the propellers while flying. On some of the product pictures it almost looks like the indoor hull has got a chrome finish. The reality is it's a black and white print which looks nothing like what you would expect from that picture at all.
Final verdict: Disillusionment. I was expecting more than that. Skynet isn't quite ready yet. It reminds of these football playing sort of robots they show you on Discovery Channel - still struggling to walk straight, oh well. Before the product launch I've seen a couple of people concerned folks on news boards that this thing might be used as a new weapon. Don't worry at all - at least until the developers actually do their homework. I'm looking forward to an advanced model fixing the image processor and ultrasound limitations as well as adding GPS. I'm quite sure there will be more and better gadgets like this soon. I'll be back!
rkoo
PS: From the FAQs: Spying on the cute girl next door probably isn't going to work either: That thing is pretty darn loud. Recording pictures and video from the front cam do require extra 3rd party apps.
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Тема: А есть ли у нас пилоты AR.Drone? (Прочитано 2855 раз)