One of the very first U.S. National Robotics Week events took place on Saturday at Stanford University. It was a two day AR Drone hackathon hosted by the Stanford Robotics Club, and the winner project involved balloons and giant needles. AWESOME.
The event actually started on Friday, and each team was given an AR Drone along with about 18 hours to come up the coolest idea ever. Or, we should say, they had to come up with the coolest idea ever and the successfully implement it. That second bit being the tricky part, of course.
The winner was team Nifty (Sam Fok, Ann Han, Wendy Nie, YooYoo Yeh, Rohit Pohitpandri, Adrian Spanu), who taught their AR Drone to fly a search pattern and then destroy balloons with optical tags on them:
Nicely done! Now let's just release one of these drones at the next Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade along with some clandestinely planted optical tags and have some fun.
Judges included Matt Ohline, a professor of mechatronics at Stanford University, Chris Anderson, CEO of 3D Robotics, Star Simpson, founder of Tacocopter, and Andreas Raptopoulos, CEO of Matternet. Here they are with all of the participants:
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After the event was over, we were treated to a couple quick demos, including an AR Drone getting controlled by a Leap Motion:
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And some DJI Phantom GoPro-carrying drones with Skycatch stickers on them:
If you like what you see, this setup is under $700, not including the GoPro.
And as far as Skycatch goes, we'll just have to wait and see what they're working on.
Oh, and the next Drone Games will be at Maker Faire next month. We'll be there!
