Drones Attack Earth in 2016

Drones = Quadcopters

Well, drones will be attacking the planet in 2016, but not in an evil, controlling way. The humans will handle that part. 2016 is the year drones become mainstream, take on lives of their own and begin to spawn related businesses, products, services, and we allow human creativity to direct us to all sorts of interesting uses for them. A byproduct of the internet that no one talks about much (I know this is relative; if you’re a big open-source geek then that’s all you talk about) is the open, sharing effect of ideas and idea generation. Synergies occur more rapidly and more often, and Moore’s law goes into effect full-force and technology whizzes past us.

We’re at the point now where we’re buying things pre-pipeline before they’re even made. Basically, I’m able to buy good ideas and have a team of motivated, smart and experienced people put together a drone for me and deliver it in a couple of months. That’s pretty good supply chain management. It’s really incredible what we’re accomplishing these days. And the reason I bought that drone down there at the bottom is that it already had surpassed the similar one I’d had my eyes on for so long in feature-set, quality, and price. And I have another one that’s going to be delivered later this year which basically is a drone that takes my iPhone for a spin, and everything my phone can do, so can the drone. Pretty cool. And affordable, which is the awesome part.

It’s weird to me that everyone calls these things “drones.” They’re really quadcopters, which have been around forever. I don’t know why all of a sudden everybody seemed to realize their seemingly limitless value. I was introduced to remote control hobbying at an early by my father, who built and flew planes when he was young as well. I did the same, so I have some experience that is surprisingly relevant. Maybe I’m just ahead of my time, or I’m now so old what’s old has become new again, but in either case, I think it’s pretty cool because I love aeronautics.

Flying them manually is hard, and if you don’t think that’s true then you aren’t manually flying them or don’t know what you’re talking about. People that demonstrate exceptional dexterity and skill with a remote control box have put in a lot of air time to get to that point and, of course, some impressive hand-eye coordination. I remember spending endless hours in the shop cutting balsa wood and pinning and gluing it all together with a faint smell of epoxy in the air when I was little. I’d build airplanes from blueprinted plans and luckily I had all the tools and gear I needed at my disposal. And you’d always crash them, which is the tragedy. But these are much more fine-tuned and engineered. And they have computers on board, which makes things much easier to control. The drone I have can avoid obstacles, invert itself, land itself, follow me on foot, bike or surfboard, and be controlled with my “phone.” Removing the very steep learning curve of learning to fly these things will have everyone wanting a quadcopter/drone, because they’re so useful in so many ways. And the video you can get with them is awesome; no other way to put it.

I wonder if, at some point in the future, we’ll all want a little flying companion hovering around us at all times? Battery life is the bottleneck, and the noise is the thorn. But once someone clever enough figures out how to deal with those “issues,” to essentially have a voice-controlled assistant droid within 2 feet of my head at all time, continuously filming in HD and awaiting commands, and able to communicate with other drones, isn’t that far away. Here’s an attempt at that, but 10 minutes flying time, and a price tag over $1000 isn’t going to be it.