Autonomous Drone Racing Kit Uses VR For First-Person View, Reaches Indiegogo Goal In An Hour

[kewlguy239]

Autonomous, a company specializing in robotics and artificial intelligence products, recently began an Indiegogo campaign for its Drone Racing Kit. The modest $10,000 goal was met within an hour of launching, and the device is still gaining momentum.

Autonomous Drone Racing Kit Uses VR For First-Person View, Reaches Indiegogo Goal In An Hour : Read more

 

[problematiq]

Seems like that would be a very motion sickness intensive thing to do.

 

[artk2219]

Those look like Syma X5SC's, which will definitely give you motion sickness, but they are fun. You could also make your own kit by buying two of them, installing the Syma FPV app on your phone, and then rigging together some cardboard glasses . But the $99 dollar pricing is pretty killer for those drones and kits.

https://www.amazon.com/Syma-X5SC-Explorers-Headless-Quadcopter/dp/B00WHY7Y74

Update: My mistake, they're X8W's, but the X5SC's would also work, relevant X8W link below.

https://www.amazon.com/Syma-2-4Ghz-Headless-Quadcopter-Camera/dp/B0141XE6LK/ref=sr_1_2?s=toys-and-games&ie=UTF8&qid=1468447444&sr=1-2&keywords=x8w

 

[bit_user]

Title is misleading. Sounds like it's a kit for racing autonomous drones, but it's clearly not. Should be: Atonomous' Drone Racing Kit... or Drone Racing Kit by Autonomous...

 

[gamebrigada]

Me and some friends attempted something like this. We gave up because of latency and wifi consistency problems. Even a basic compression on the drone side is complicated and provides a decent amount of latency, then throwing that stream into the wifi stack is just a pain in the ass. The amount of jitter in the frame latency is insane, and with some considerable latency in the stream. Wifi is simply not created for a full bandwidth stream with low latencies in mind. I started working on my own wireless protocol that simply doesn't care about dropped packets, but that project hasn't taken off. The proof of concept I setup was running at 720p using the extremely good raspberry pi on chip H.264 encoder, with almost a perfect signal the overall system averaged about 500ms of latency. Far too high for racing applications, and that's an unacceptably low resolution for "VR"

 

[WFang]

This article (and the photo showing all the stuff) and also their campaign is misleading because only the super early bird and the $149 package comes with all the things. The $99 kit does not come with flags, cones or a bag/backpack . Their rep' on Indigogo also keeps talking to people about how the $99 kit does not include "VR Cameras" "like the super early bird" but I don't see "VR Cameras" mentioned anywhere, which adds to the confusion and makes me wonder if they mean the VR headsets are not included?

Also, I reserved one based on the campaign text and the video, rushed because I wanted the $99 early bird, then noticed how it is missing a lot of the items, and then found out you can't cancel unless by the grace of the creator.. what a mess of a campaign.

Still, the $99 could still be a good deal.

 

[ChrisFromAD]

That's interesting, so instead of having a separate screen you can just use your phone's processing power to get the FPV experience. And why not, our phones these days have more power than the first computers that send man on the moon.