A new drone called Fleye uses a new safer drone design, using protective grids to prevent any injury from the drones spinning blades— the creators made sure that the Fleye was safe to use.The main innovation of Fleye is its unique spherical design, where all moving parts are fully shielded. This means that you can hold, touch, push, and bump into Fleye without any risks of injuring yourself and others. It also means that Fleye will be more robust when bumping into something.
They’ve also made Fleye open and programmable. Its API and SDK make it a great development platform for anyone willing to explore the future of flying robotics and its potential applications.
Fleye can be controlled using a smartphone application (iOS/Android support). You don’t need piloting skills, just select a flying camera mode (selfie, panorama, virtual tripod, etc.), watch the live video stream and focus on capturing great photos and videos. You prefer to be in manual control? Then use the virtual gamepad or hook a bluetooth gamepad to your smartphone.
Fleye has a powerful on-board computer, similar to the latest smartphones. It is a dual-core ARM A9, with hardware accelerated video encoding, two GPUs, 512MB of RAM and it runs Linux. It also supports the popular Computer Vision library OpenCV. This means that Fleye can be programmed to execute mission autonomously, reacting to what it sees in its environment.
The Kickstarter campaign can be viewed here.
Source: Website
The designers should be congratulated on trying to achieve a safer design of RPA. However, whilst this was being displayed on live TV with a journalist from a height of approx. 6feet it crashed and was damaged. This was an “indoors” setting. Not so robust!
“New” safe design? It looks a lot like a ducted fan system, like Terrantula Hawk.
They didn’t operate quite so well…