The Editors of Make - Make: DIY drone and quadcopter projects: a collection of drone-based essays, tutorials, and projects

by The Editors of Make:

Copyright 2016 Maker Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

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• April 2016: First Edition

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978-1-680-45129-0

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The first section of the book is a collection of feature articles from the pages of Make:, providing an introduction to the world of drones: those autonomous aerial vehicles that mostly (but not always) take the form of small quad-rotor helicopters called quadcopters.

The first article looks into what exactly drones are, and more importantly, what they are not. The second article provides a detailed breakdown of the anatomy of a drone: from its airframe to its propellers, from its battery to its brain. Subsequent articles look at how drones work, the positive ways drones are being usedas a way to drop food and other supplies to refugees in war-torn places around the world, and other uses for remote flying vehicles. With these five articles under your belt, youll be in a great position to understand and enjoy the rest of the book!

Not everybody likes the word droneindustry and military experts avoid using the D word in public. They prefer the term unmanned aerial system or vehicle and associated acronyms UAS or UAV. Despite plenty of misgivings about military and spy drones, the word drone has become widespread and popular, used with great enthusiasm by hobbyists who hang out on the DIY Drones site and by professional aerial photographers like the L.A.-based Drone Dudes. So what is a drone?

Dale Dougherty, founder of Make: Magazine and creator of Maker Faire

The original meaning of drone is a male bee. The body of a drone is biggerthan all other bees (except the queen), but what physically distinguishes adrone is a larger pair of compound eyes. Yet drones have no real work to do butreproduce. They make late afternoon flights to what is called a congregationarea, where drones gather looking to mate with a virgin queen. Once these beessucceed, however (and they perform this act in midair), the drones fall out ofthe sky, having left an essential body part behind. Thats all that drones do.

The notion that a drone doesnt have much work of its own leads to asecondary definition of a drone as someone who lives off the work of othersa parasite. In fact, at the end of summer, the worker bees kick the remainingdrones out of the hive. They eat too much and do too little. They can bereplaced in the spring.

This helps set up the problem. We not only need to figure out a definitionfor drones, we also have to figure out what theyre going to doand not do.While some agree that drones are unmanned, others point out that theyre piloted,preferring the acronym RPA for remotely piloted aircraft. That wouldntdifferentiate drones from remote-control aircraft, but it emphasizes that ahuman, who can be held responsible, is at the controls. A drone can be operatedmanually or it can be programmed to follow a fixed flight plan.

The distinguishing feature of a drone seems to be the promise of autonomy.Today, a typical flight consists of switching between manual flight andautopilot. How much further might it go? Given the right instrumentation and theability to process that data, could a drone be programmed to make context-awaredecisions, particularly ones that humans are not very good at? A drone mightdetect problems before they occur, such as responding to gusts of wind oravoiding unexpected obstacles. A drone might also be able to communicate withother drones.

Can a drone be considered a robot, able to obey Asimovs Three Laws ofRobotics? We need drones that explicitly avoid harming humans and can act toprotect themselves from destruction. We should expect this much from any fullyautonomous vehicle. A drone then might be said to have a mind of its own.

Until such time, however, that responsibility falls on the person flying thedrone. When you fly a drone, you arent just a useryoure a pilot. You mustprotect your equipment, yourself, and most importantly, other people. A bad orincompetent pilot can injure people or invade their privacy. Its not a lotdifferent from owning a pet or a car.

Good pilots, like the Drone Dudes, worry that bad or careless pilots willgarner the publics attention, create a climate of fear, and cause governmentsto restrict or eliminate drones for commercial or recreational use. The reasonwe need better technology is that few of us are very good pilots.

For makers, the most interesting challenge isnt just building drones orflying them. Its discovering what drones are good for, what creative uses theyhave, and what tough problems they might solve. Otherwise, planes andquadcopters will be sold only as toys, not tools, and many people will discardthem once they lose interest in their playthings. Were hoping drones becomeplatforms for developing compelling applications that will push the technologyforward and adjust the balance between the light and the dark side of drones.

Figure I-1. An example of how cool you can be with a drone.