The idea here is that the drone control software will just be another app on a phone or tablet that a soldier would be carrying with them anyway, so as not to add to their load. User control is through a touchscreen device like phone or a tablet, running whatever OS happens to be on it. The case has the battery for the drone at the top, and a control base station that the microfilament is connected to. For scale, note the drone and smartphone in the top pic. Here’s the complete kit for Pocket Flyer. You don’t know when to expect these things, so you’ll need this robot always with you.” And that’s exactly what this robot will be it’ll be the one you have with you when you get to that dangerous situation. The best robot is the one you have with you. The Pocket Flyer fits in a cargo pants pocket. “We took to special forces and IED guys, and they loved them, they wanted them, but the feedback that we also got was, ‘We’d like to carry it more easily.’ It fits into a backpack, and that’s great, but what are you going to leave out of the backpack? They need all this stuff. Why was it necessary for CyPhy Works to come out with a brand new drone that’s so tiny? For soldiers in the field, Greiner says, it’s all about making sure that they’re able to have a drone with them: Here’s a video of a prototype of the Pocket Flyer in action: if you look closely, you can barely see the microfilament tether unspooling: This way, there’s never any tension on the wire, and it can snag on stuff without affecting the performance of the robot. The robot carries a spool of 250 feet (76 meters) of wire onboard, and feeds it out as it moves forward. The reason that a microfilament works at all in applications like these is that it unspools from the robot, and not from the base station. The microfilament is impervious to that.” If you’re not that technologically sophisticated, you can actually just put noise into the environment and jam the signals, and the drone will lose control. “If you see these wireless systems, you can look at the signal, and potentially take control of the vehicle. And, you’re protected from malicious people trying to mess with your drone, as Greiner explains: You can put a lot of obstacles between you and your drone without having to worry about losing communications. You get high definition video with no lag. Power may be the primary reason why the Pocket Flyer uses a microfilament thether, but there are a bunch of other reasons why it’s a good idea. If you’re plugged into the grid, these robots could stay aloft for days. Anything that can run on batteries (and hover) is probably only going to be aloft for 10 or perhaps 20 minutes at best.Īs CyPhy Works founder and CEO Helen Greiner told IEEE Spectrum, “That’s about enough time to go into a building and find a person, and then ‘Oh, our robot went dead.’ ” The microfilament, in contrast, provides a constant source of power to your robot, so you can fly any drone that uses the system until your base station (which doesn’t have to move) runs out of power. With flying robots, though, endurance is a serious problem. And for ground robots, that’s usually not too hard to do, since they’re not fighting gravity all the time. Ideally, your robots would be efficient enough to be able to run on batteries, completely independently. What’s the catch? There isn’t one, except for the clever thing that grants all of CyPhy’s UAVs their special powers: a microfilament tether that unspools the drone and keeps it constantly connected to communications and power.ĬyPhy Works had the brilliant idea of bringing a thing back to robots that has (or had) a reputation of being somewhat of a crutch: a tether. It’ll fly continuously for two hours or more, sending back high quality HD video the entire time. It fits in your pocket and weighs a mere 80 grams. Anybody who’s ever flown a rotary wing drone will look at the stats of CyPhy Works’ new Pocket Flyer drone and be amazed.
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