Tossing sticks around between flying robots isn't inherently useful, but it means they have a foundation for further, more complex work.

But these aren't free-flying quadcopters; the researchers used a very high-end motion capture rig and a PC in close proximity, making everything a lot less difficult - with motion capture, positional accuracy is quite easy and sensor noise is easy to correct for, and with enough money someone else has already solved the latency issues in motion-capture for you.

I certainly agree this video is impressive but I also believe lab-only motion capture-based demos skew the hobbyist and public vision of what small quadcopters can do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cseTX_rW3uM&t=50

I don't know how much of that was motion-capture, it seems like a quite difficult environment to have done that...

I think all of the KMel Robotics projects (at least all of the ones I've seen on video, like the Bond theme) have used the same basic design, which involves a Vicon system.

Pretty much everyone in the open-source arena (Ardupilot, OpenPilot, Paparazzi, PARIS/WiiCopter) experiments with various filtering approaches and sensor fusion strategies.

One interesting challenge is that more sensors increases cost and hobbyists are often cash-strapped (especially after crashing a lot!), so sensor fusion isn't as heavily pursued as adaptive control and basic filtering strategies for 6-axis input.

I had a lot to do with the question of "where the hell are we & how the hell do we get to where we should be" in real time and to fairly tight tolerances (at scale) - sadly/luckily at the time it was left to the pilot to follow the blinking light rather than deal with the mechanics of moving control surfaces directly.

The main thrust of surveys like [1] though was enhanced final product accuracy through sensor fusion strategies, using calibration flights to tune filters to remove induced magnetic field effects from aircraft headings, using lidar, microwave, accelerometers, differential ground GPS, temperature, pressure, and humidity to get good estimates for actual height clearances, estimates for the mass of air column, etc, etc, blah, blah, old guy stuff.

That's a single survey of many, performed over decades, and it was interesting in the evolution of processing to watch it move from post processing to in line processing. Which of course prompted the question.

The paparazzi (seriously france? this is for drone RC craft to snap pics of celebrity boobs?) project pages look interesting, so I'll dive into those.

[1] Fiji, 1997 "A combination of helicopter and fixed wing aircraft was used to fly the survey with a total of 160, 000 line kilometers of data acquistion (~80,000km per aircraft type)"

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/why-doesnt-the-ball-fall...

The only change is that sensors are manufactured in such large quantities, that they are so cheap that they are omnipresent (ie. almost every phone -- inconceivable decades ago). Quadcopters are also more stable by design than one would think (easier to stabilize than conventional ones).

How about "Transport the flag?" Or how about a bunch of flags? The other team is allowed to try and disrupt your transportation as well.

"And then whichever Seeker gets lucky swoops in and grabs the Snitch and makes everyone else's work moot. It's like someone took a real game and grafted on this pointless extra position so that you could be the Most Important Player without needing to really get involved or learn the rest of it. Who was the first Seeker, the King's idiot son who wanted to play Quidditch but couldn't understand the rules?"

They profiled a new type of drone which is basically a human-controlled missile. Fly it right into a window!

Make 1000 of them ($5 000 000 is sth like 1 tank), put them in groups of 20 in 50 places where you suspect enemy will attack. Program them to wait with sensors on, when they detect enemy tanks they go up, land on tanks and explode. Tanks usually have much less armor on the top.

Grenade lobbing is quite pedestrian compared to "precision targeting" in the video here: http://bit.ly/W6DnuO

Repairing wind-blown greenhouses in remote places as quickly as possible?

Building a water-pipe as quickly as possible?

Elevator-to-the-stars building mechanic?

I recently got a vacuum roomba and I am very entertained just on by watching it work. But I am a geek, probably not everybody is like that.