Firefly Drone Shows

We are just now beginning to see the possibilities of orchestrated drone swarms and how they can be used for entertainment. In the not too distant future firework shows in American will be replaced with organized drone shows and halftime shows at the Super Bowl will showcase a synchronized display of visuals that align with the entertainment.

Manus industrial robots

The 30 second mark is quite interesting and odd how the robots move the way they do when humans are walking bye. Manus is a set of ten industrial robots that are programmed to behave like a pack of animals. While each robot moves independently, they share the same central brain. So instead of acting in isolation, they have intertwined behaviors that ripple through the group as people walk by.

Autonomous robot stunt doubles

This is a prototype of the animatronic figure in Walt Disney World's Pandora: The World of Avatar

Google's dog robot, Spot

Spot is a four-legged robot designed for indoor and outdoor operation. It is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated. Spot has a sensor head that helps it navigate and negotiate rough terrain. Spot weighs about 160 lbs.

Balancing robot from Japan aims to cheer people up

The cute side of the robocalypse: Balancing robots from Japan

muRata manufacturing wants to cheer people up with its latest balancing machine. It’s part of a group of swarm robots, called the murata cheerleaders. But it’s not exactly clear what they’re cheering for.

Police Used a Drone to Chase Down and Arrest Four DUI Suspects

Shit is getting real. Last Friday, near a cornfield in North Dakota, four underage men were pulled over under suspicion of drunk driving. The four men hopped out of their car and bolted into the cornfield. Grand Forks police didn't follow them: Instead, they put a drone in the sky.

"One of them was walking through the cornfield. It took about three minutes to find him," Alan Frazier, Deputy Sheriff in charge of the Grand Forks Police Department's unmanned aerial vehicle system unit told me. "The other was found on a second flight, after maybe 25 minutes."

The two other suspects were apprehended at another time—they had the unlucky distinction of becoming the first Americans ever tracked down and arrested with the help of a police quadcopter.

Welcome to the future of police work.

The Qube drone that was used to chase down four DUI suspects last weekend. Image: Author

That it happened around Grand Forks is not a surprise. 

Two years ago, a cattle rancher near there was arrested with the help of a Department of Homeland Security Predator drone, becoming the first man arrested in the US with the help of a drone. These four men become the first to be arrested in the US with the help of a local police drone (as of 2013, there were roughly 24 police agencies using drones).

Two weeks ago, in something of a coincidence, I sat in a conference room in Grand Forks as Frazier pitched me and several other journalists on the force's use of drones.

To start off the presentation, he pulled up this video, made by AeroVironment, the company that makes the Qube, the drone that Frazier and his team and several other police departments around the country use:

Frazier called the video, in which a fugitive is tracked down with a drone, "a little Hollywood," but that's essentially what happened there, last week. The Grand Forks Police Department is the first in the United States to get Federal Aviation Administration approval to fly at night, and last weekend's mission was the very first time the department had ever used the Qube at night on a mission.

"There's a misnomer that these are covert spy tools," Frazier told me when I was in Grand Forks. "We utilize them for events that are already occurring. We look for felony suspects, we do further analysis, we use them for totally overt missions. There's no plans to use them covertly."

DOES HE HAVE A REASONABLE EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY? IF SO, THEN WE'D SEEK A SEARCH WARRANT.

"That's not to say they can't be used for covert missions, but they haven't been," he added. A video he showed us pitched the Qube as a "powerful surveillance tool."

The back of the "UAS Unit" SUV. Image: Author

Tim Schuh, the police officer most often tasked with actually flying the thing, says it's been used about a dozen times in the last year—only once while actually looking for a suspect (before this last case). "We're not flying over downtown looking for trouble," he said.

Still, the department seems a bit gung-ho about drones in a way that many others are not. Frazier balked at the idea that the department should or would get a warrant before flying one. (California Gov. Jerry Brown just vetoed a bill that would have required police in the state to get a warrant before using a drone).

A fourth suspect has remained unnamed because he is believed to be under 18. Image:  Valley News Live

When I asked Frazier if he thinks a warrant should be necessary, he said, "absolutely not. We do a quick litmus test—'does he have a reasonable expectation of privacy?' If so, then we'd seek a search warrant."

So far, the drone had been flown on 11 different occasions, only once to search for a fugitive (it wasn't successful that time). It's been used to monitor flooding, look for missing persons, take videos of a sexual assault scene, take photos of a murder scene, and once to get photos of a traffic accident scene.

After telling us about the drone program, Frazier took me outside, where Schuh was on hand to show off the Qube's capabilities. The Qube lives in the back of a police SUV that's marked "UAS Unit." Schuh set it up, and the Qube, a quadcopter not much bigger than the white Phantom drones that have become so popular with hobbyists, took off and immediately began sending footage back down to the ground station.

At this point, the process has become routine. Maybe that's why, when those four men ran off into the cornfield, police didn't chase them, Frazier said. Instead, the drone was called in and found them.

"From there, it was just like any other foot pursuit," he told me. "You chase them down and take them to jail."

Telsa P85D Self Driving Vehicle

I'm posting this sole' for the Autopilot preview at the end of this video. Giving up control of something that could end your life is a scary thought but automation is here and Telsa has brought the discussion to the forefront. Zero to 60 in 3.2 seconds. A high-end, all-wheel-drive option of the Model S on Thursday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the target for acceleration was the world's greatest supercars. What the company ended up with was 3.2 seconds from 0 to 60, something that really doesn't look like much on paper, but feels like being in a rocket ship when you're actually inside a vehicle, and ultimately behind the wheel.

TED: Raffaello D'Andrea - The astounding athletic power of quadcopters

In a robot lab at TEDGlobal, Raffaello D'Andrea demos his flying quadcopters: robots that think like athletes, solving physical problems with algorithms that help them learn. In a series of nifty demos, D'Andrea show drones that play catch, balance and make decisions together -- and watch out for an I-want-this-now demo of Kinect-controlled quads.