Three drones on retractable dog leashes fly overhead, capturing live aerial video of the all the faces gaping from auditorium seats below. Welcome to TED 2014.
The leashes are held by Sergei Lupashin, the Zurich-based roboticist who invented these tethered quadcopters. He calls them Fotokites, and the idea is to show that a leash can completely change the nature of a drone. Attaching a leash to an unmanned aerial vehicle eliminates the need for special piloting skills, he says. What's more, a drone leashed to you suddenly makes it easy to hold you accountable for whatever it's doing. The tether takes the anonymity out of aerial surveillance.
"It's like a kite, so the safety situation is very different," Lupashin assured the audience before launching the drones over their heads at TED, the annual ideas conference that got under way today in Vancouver, Canada.
Fotokites use standard dog leashes, Lupashin says. But thanks to software on board the Fotokites, the drones always fly at the same angle relative to their "pilots," no matter where that person moves, allowing for steady control over photos and video shot from above. He demonstrates this dog-like behavior by walking around the stage as the three drones follow.
Lupashin, a postdoc at the University of Zurich's Robotics and Perception Group and a TED Fellow, envisions these Fotokites as an especially useful tool for journalists. He opened his brief talk with aerial photos taken at massive street demonstrations in Russia in 2011 to protest the election process. From the air, he said, the huge scale of the protests was undeniable. "It's just not possible to consider this event insignificant."
But drone photography has traditionally required skill and practice, he says. The protest pictures were taken by a group of Russian drone-photography aficionados called AirPano. One drone pilot wore a bright orange vest emblazoned with a request that onlookers wait until landing to ask questions. That, Lupashin said, showed just how hard it can be to fly a drone untethered: "This is a very high barrier of entry to access this unique perspective."
Lupashin sees Fotokites being used not just by journalists by everyone from firefighters to archeologists for overhead footage of their digs. Weighing in at just about a pound, they do seem easy to take just about anywhere. Lupashin, for instance, fit three Fotokites inside a small briefcase that he brought on stage before launching them over the conference audience.
A consumer version of Fotokite is slated to go on sale by the end of 2014. They could have special appeal in the U.S., where the legal status of commercial drones is stuck in court. As Lupashin pointed out, Federal Aviation Administration regulations on "unmanned aerial vehicles" don't apply to tethered aircraft. The FAA is still fighting the right of citizens to fly unmanned aerial vehicles. Add a leash, however, and apparently it's cool to take a drone for a walk.
