Chris from Hobby Town brought a whole bunch of different size and shape remote control multicopters. He showed us all the basic parts required to make everything from a basic one that has self leveling all the way up to fully autonomous, tell-it-what-gps-coordinates-to-fly-to-and-it-will drones. There were some with cameras attached and some without. Some can be used just for fun and to race and some can be used for business like aerial photography and light GPS mapping and simple land surveying. I can even imagine using one of these to do some high top power pole and transmission tower inspections for power utility companies.
I have a plan to make a “telepresence” copter that has a camera on a gimbal mounted on the copter that beams the live video down to the user wearing a head mounted display like an Oculus Rift. Then the user can just look around and it would pan and tilt the camera the same as they are moving their head. Then the user can fly it with one of those rubber puck 3D CAD mouse controllers for more intuitive flight controls. All of this together would give the user the feeling like they were actually flying!
Gene showed his sumo bot he built to compete on the circle arena we made for mini sumo bot competitions.
