A lot of people got drones for Christmas this year (and many Hackaday readers already had one, anyway). A lot of these drones have cameras on them. The expensive ones beam back live video via RF. The cheaper ones just record to an SD card that you can download later.
If you are NASA, of course, this just isn’t good enough. At the Langley Research Center in Virginia, they’ve been building the Greased Lightning (also known as the GL-10) which is a 10-engine tilt-prop unmanned aerial vehicle. The carbon fiber drone is impressive, sure, but what wows is the recent video NASA released (see below).
You can watch the video on your PC but don’t. If you have Google Cardboard, this is what Cardboard was made to do. If you don’t, at least watch it on a phone or a tablet. You’ll be able to look all around (and up and down) just by moving your phone. It makes for an awesome flight video. If you just have to watch it on a desktop, YouTube will show you some controls to let you navigate the view, but it just isn’t the same.
We’ve seen tilt rotors before, but this is way out in front of just about anything we’ve seen before. Even without the airframe, we’d love to have the camera system on our flying bots.
Photo: NASA Langley/David Bowman
Thanks [Scott Anderson] for the tip.
Filed under: drone hacks
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