Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Live at SXSW: MAKE talks with 3DR”.
So this is the make south by southwest fly zone right here behind us and we’re uh flying drones. All weekend long we’ve invited a couple teams of top experts, including the good people from 3d robotics. This is scott who’s, one of the one of the crew members at 3dr and uh scott tell us about this uh demonstration you’re about to do this is our new iris. We have a three axis, gopro gimbal on it. We’Re gon na fly it around a little bit.
Try to get some views of austin here. Okay – and this thing it’s it’s got a it’s got a live link to uh. The transmitter is that right, live video, downlink, getting footage straight off the gopro at a 5.8 gigahertz, okay, great! Well, let’s uh! Let’S check it out! That’S really close to that fence. How gutsy am i feeling so there’s a little bit of wind here on the ground? How much does something like that affect you as you’re flying? It definitely affects the craft, but the flight controller does pretty well with the gps uh capabilities to keep it keep it where you want it to be yeah this.
It’S got a loiter mode. Tell me about that. What does that mean? It basically locks to multiple gps satellites and holds its position to a relatively small radius. So right now you’re, it’s it’s it’s maintaining its own thing, your hands off right now, on the on the controller. In anything, it’s it’s flying itself. At this point, that’s great now tell me about the uh. The three axis gimbal you’ve got uh ability to control that, while you’re flying the the quadcopter while flying the quadcopter, we can also get a.
We can also get a nice little tilt with the gimbal here, getting 90 degrees. Looking straight down and looking straight forward here, that’s great and then i can see on your uh on your transmitter. You’Ve got the uh. You’Ve got this display where you know you’re. Looking uh we’re looking through the eyes of the quadcopter as you’re flying, that’s uh, that’s a pretty cool setup.
What’S up, you said it’s a 5.8 gigahertz uh! What’S a range for something like that, it’s uh pretty close to a mile. You can definitely fly it much further than you can. You can really see it from the ground. How many times have you done that uh multiple multiple times? It seems really scary it.
It can be the first couple times, but you just have to have to have face faith in the equipment, trust that it’s going to come back and do what you, what you tell it to do to do and beyond the loiter mode. What other types of autonomous capabilities does the iris have the iris and the pix hawk the flight controller have the ability to fly uh, gps, guided waypoints through our mission, planner software e, very easy drop and go drop. A waypoint and it’ll fly to that waypoint. You can set predetermined missions and repeat them. Multiple times makes flying the vehicle very easily there’s a setup where it uh it interfaces with uh nexus tablets. Android tablets is that correct, yeah all android tablets, it’s optimized for seven inch tablets, but can work on smaller and larger tablets, very user-friendly, very convenient out in the fields.
How about the uh? The stunt capabilities? Is this something that you tend to see much stunt flying with, or is it uh does it? Is it often used for other things? Absolutely you can definitely fly it fly it for stunt purposes. Obviously, without the camera on it, you can definitely strip it down to just the bare iris, fla iris frame and fly for stun and just rip it around for good fun. Do you find people do that more often, or are you seeing this type of thing used for more practical purposes, a lot of people? A lot of people are definitely getting more into the practical purposes. It’S um kind of the older, more experienced pilots that want to go rip them around and do flips and do crazy stuff. So beyond um aerial flying uh, you see people doing um, wildlife, observation, agricultural observation, anything else. That’S caught your attention! Lots of industrial surveying 3d mapping pretty cool all the way, but all built into the mission planner software just does all the math for you.
There tells you exactly where the helicopter needs to fly and you just press go and it does it for you. That’S great! Well, thanks, it’s a that’s! A cool demo and uh excited to see uh see where it goes. I know the iris just came out, so this is uh. This is great to see it in action.
Yeah. Absolutely! Thank you. Yeah thanks! Scott .