This is awesome. And insane. And inching the general public a lot closer to doing the entirely mess-free job of remote killing.
Who do we have to thank for this? A woman.
From Wired:
MIT professor Missy Cummings used to fly F/A-18 Hornet fighters for the Navy. “I spent whole time complaining — who was the moron who designed this thing?” she recalled. If you’ve ever peeked inside a fighter cockpit, you’ll understand her gripe. Dials, displays and controls pack every nook and cranny. It’s the farthest thing from ergonomic.
The problem stuck with Cummings, after she got out of the Navy. She went on to get a Ph.D. in “cognitive systems engineering” before getting hired at MIT, where she heads the Humans and Automation Lab, or HAL. “There’s a joke in the name,” she pointed out.
Her crew of 30 grad students and undergrads is chasing a number of new ideas and technologies, all aimed at easing the sometimes unwieldy interactions between machines and their human masters. As an example, she refers to the complex, suitcase-sized controller that soldiers must haul around to control hand-thrown Raven unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. Cummings wants something simpler. And what could be simpler than an iPhone?
Actually, using an iPhone was her undergrads’ idea — because experimenting with it as a basis for a new robot controller meant she’d have to buy them all iPhones of their own. “We had the idea in June,” Cummings told Danger Room. “In six weeks, we went from the idea to a real flight test,” using MIT’s indoor robot range. The total cost? $5,000 for a new, commercially available, quad-rotor robot — plus the cost of iPhones for her crew.
And there's a newer video showing how they've got it to fly to waypoints here.
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