So, drones. Plenty of work has gone into making our flying robot dreams come true, but we haven’t spent a lot of time refining the whole “controlling” thing. I always thought Jedis had a good thing going with the whole hand-waving approach and it looks like I’m not the only one.
Photo: Kostadin Lazarov
As part of this year’s NASA Space Apps Challenge, an enterprising team of four from Skopje, Macedonia decided to bring a Force-controlled drone future a little closer.
By hacking a Sony SmartBand using a combination of home-made ingenuity and open source projects, the team was able to send commands to a drone via simple gestures. The result — the awesomeness below:
The wristband also packs a few extra features, such as weather information and data on no-fly zones, so you don’t have to worry about CASA tackling you in a park.
If you’re up for a super-technical explanation of how it works, there’s a post on Medium that provides exactly that. For a more general overview, you can hit up the project’s page on NASA’s Space Apps site.
[Medium]