Since typical drone designs come along with various safety concerns, such as propellers and weight, and some still require some piloting skills, a French engineering duo decided to create a safer version of a hobbyist drone.
Laurent Eschenauer and Dimitri Arendt created Fleye, a drone about the size and weight of a soccer ball that is powered by a single propeller that is fully shielded. The team says you can hold Fleye in your hands, even throw it and catch it like a ball.
Fleye can be controlled via smartphone using the accompanying app (available for both iOs and Android). The Fleye creators developed the flying robot in such a way that no piloting skills are required to operate. Users just need to select a flying camera mode (selfie, panorama, virtual tripod, etc.) and they can watch the live video stream and and capture photos and video along the way. For users who prefer to manually operate the drone, Fleye offers a virtual gamepad and a bluetooth gamepad that can be hooked up to your smartphone.
Inside Fleye
Fleye is open-source and programmable.The drone contains an on-board computer, similar to the ones within smartphones. It is a dual-core ARM A9, with hardware accelerated video encoding, two GPUs, 512MB of RAM and it runs Linux. Fleye also supports the Computer Vision library, OpenCV, which means that it can be programmed to operate autonomously and react to its environment.
What do you do with a flying camera ball robot?
If you’re not sure what you would do with your own drone, the company offers up some suggestions. Fleye can be used for photography purposes, to develop drone applications, for marketing and events, educations and research purposes, or just to say you flew your own drone.
Eschenauer and Arendt have started a Kickstarter campaign in an attempt to raise almost $186,000 for the development of their drones. So far, the duo has raised over $95,000. Anyone interested can visit the team’s Kickstarter page, where they are offering early backers a Fleye for 50% off its retail price.
Watch the team’s Kickstarter video to see how it works.
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