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Here’s a prototype of an autonomous helicopter with four engines (quadrotor) capable of carrying out extreme movements in confined areas.

Daniel Mellinger, Nathan Michael and Vijay Kumar from Grasp Lab at the University of Pennsylvania have designed this ultra easy to use UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle).

The quadricopter passes easily through windows in a vertical position regardless of the angle of the opening.

It does so at a high speed and stabilizes itself the right way up or upside down immediately after.

There could be many applications for this type of drone: military intelligence, for the police, or even for natural disasters such as the collapse of buildings.

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The Micropilot MP-Vision Glider is an unmanned air vehicle.

It can be preprogrammed with specific flight plans in advance.

This drone can be optionally equipped with a camera to take snapshots of crops or forest areas, for example.

The MP-Vision has a radio control but can also fly autonomously.

It has GPS for taking geographically targeted photos, and it can be hand launched as well as land in restricted spaces.

This UAV is 1.22 m long, has a wing span of 2.44 m and weighs 2.72 kg.

Its flight endurance is about 55 minutes and its average speed is 60 km/h.

You can buy the Mircropilot MP-Vision UAV on RobotShop.

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What a wonderful idea to send a Drone to scan the Tyrolean Alps.

This drone is equipped with a High Definition camera; the pictures taken show the beauty of this magnificient landscape.

It skims the trees and the summit of the mountains while flying. This is very daring since its prototype could crash.

Tt also met some paragliders en route.

We sell the Drone Skybotix helicopter at RobotShop.

Details on RCgroups

The set up:

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The Skybotix CoaX UAV Drone is an autonomous micro helicopter.

It is a coaxial helicopter robot ideal for research and education.

It features two brushless motors for the rotors and two servo motors for guidance.

To communicate, the Skybotix CoaX uses a Bluetooth connection and also an optional WiFi module. It can be guided with a 2.4 GHz remote control.

It has numerous applications and that’s what makes it interesting.

The Skybotix Drone can be used in professional fields: for customs patrols; monitoring traffic; searching for people in natural disasters and/or fires, avalanches, etc.; collecting information for the police, from maps, aerial photos and inspections of bridges and dams.

For education, it can be used for non-linear systems from autonomous navigation, estimation theory, from real-time control, from analysis in frequency fields, etc.

Two months ago, Helen Greiner, iRobot’s co-founder, won a contract worth several million dollars for her new company, Cyphy Works, to develop a new type of autonomous flying device able to inspect infrastructures, bridges, etc. But why develop this type of product? It doesn’t make too much sense because… RobotShop has it available for sale already!!

A video showing the CoaX using an optical mouse sensor:

Here it operates at a fixed distance from a wall allowing two people to bounce it back and forth as in table tennis:

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