Stanford Autonomous Helicopter by Claudia Sonea

Looking at the bright side of life, there is always a domain that will be a joy for sour eyes and that is: technology. There is always something new on the technology market that means more jobs, more money and a boost in economy. It is true that it requires also a lot of money to research and come up with an invention a breaking discovery, but if it proves to be successful, than it will all worth it.
The US is proud to be a leader in the domain mentioned previously and that is because young people are involved even from early years in development of IT products. For instances some of the famous Universities like Stanford are supporting projects of their students. I mentioned Stanford because the project that I will discuss further in the article belongs to its students, Pieter Abbeel, Adam Coates, Morgan Quigley and Timothy Hunter, in collaboration with Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department, Andrew Y.Ng. It is called “autonomous helicopter” and it even has a Web page http://heli.stanford.edu/ where they state the goal: “to push the state-of-the-art in autonomous helicopter flight: extreme aerobatics under computer control”.
A number of companies doing business with surveillance and mapping applications have already contacted the research group after the first test of the autonomous helicopter on Monday over the Stanford University campus. Researchers believe that the artificial intelligence system with which is equipped the helicopter could rather be used to scout wildfires, on military missions, than mapping. They should however, lay down all difference of opinion and wait to see the outcome of this project that is still being developed.
For the system, an accelerometer, gyroscope, a magnetometer, a GPS or two ground-based cameras researchers spent around $4,000, but surely they will a bigger amount of money, so that they efforts can be repaid. If all turns out to be without problems, this could become a mass industry and open the door to a whole new spectrum of inventions. Don’t go away, more to come…


related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080916/tc_nm/helicopter_robot_dc;_ylt=AllfNk118NgJV0uaPRQ2Rzms0NUE

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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edited by Beata Biskova