Micro Air Vehicles 152
Offwhite98 writes "Over at The Gainesville Sun they are running an article about really small planes used to watch all kinds of stuff. I am sure the common applications for these devices are pretty clear, but if you could use these for a lot of fun. Use 10 of them as flying candid cameras at a wedding or a party and you I am sure you will get interesting results." A little bigger than the Spy Fly but probably much more robust.
Do it yourself UAV kit (Score:5, Informative)
http://autopilot.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
News release from the competition (Score:2, Informative)
http://unicomm.byu.edu/news1/mynews/releases/ar
MAVs and MFIs (Score:3, Informative)
Buy a MAV today (Score:2, Informative)
"Simple" solution... (Score:3, Informative)
What about automatic pilots, though? For example, the AeroVironment Black Widow [aerovironment.com], which is a six-inch aircraft, has "altitude hold, airspeed hold, heading hold, and yaw damping" (from the PDF available on their site).
With bigger r/c vehicles, total autonomous flight was achieved a long time ago, even for helicopters, which are much more difficult to stabilize than planes. This can allow an operator to simply guide rather than actually pilot a vehicle, with greatly reduced chance of error.
This already exists in commercial technology: there's an r/c helicopter, made by Honda iirc, used for applications like cropspraying and aerial photography. An operator can fly these with minimal training, because stabilization is automatic.