Drones reach take-off
We have become a bit addicted to UAV or
drone flying videos here of late, partly because they produce some
astonishing images and partly because the skill of the pilots
involved is occasionally phenomenal. The good news is that it’s a
field rapidly taking off (ahem) and prices are tumbling, all of which
makes it easy to get involved yourself.
Of course it’s the ubiquity of the
GoPro camera that has brought the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle out of the
realm of the military and into the range of not just the broadcaster
but the hobbyist as well. Now, for somewhere under £1000 – and
that covers camera and vehicle – you too can start flying your own
semi-pro rig.
DJI’s Phantom Quad probably
represents the low end of the market at the moment. It flies right
out of the box, meaning that all you have to do is attach the four
propellors, charge the LiPo and install the transmitter batteries
before use. Control distance is roughly 300m (it operates in the
2.4Ghz ISM band) max speed is 10m/s horizontal and 6m/s vertical, and
a fully charged unit will give you somewhere between 10 to 15 minutes
of flight time. It also features a host of flight aides to help the
novice pilot, probably the most useful being a Return to Home
function aided and abetted by its inbuilt GPS which triggers when it
flies out of control range.
The price for all this? Around £500.
If you want to step things up a notch,
the company also does a hexa-rotor platform which can carry loads up
to 2.5kg and adds another £1000 to the price. As is usual with a
rapidly developing market, there are a serious amount of different
systems available now in this mid-price range with four, six or eight
rotor blade configurations. Equally they are capable of carrying a
variety of different weights for a variety of different durations.
Still, at least the research process if you’re looking to buy one
should be fun.
After that, things ramp up a bit. If
you really want to invest in improving your aerial images
stabilisation is key. Of course, this can be done in post with
varying degrees of success depending on the quality of the original
images and how much grunt you can throw at the problem. Or you can
invest in a gimbal whose inbuilt server motors react quickly enough
to damp down any image vibration. This is a particular problem for
live TV, and the reason why so many sports events use blimps as they
provide a stable, if immovable, image platform, Gimbal prices start
at around £2000 for a model lightweight enough for aerial work and
head rapidly north from there very quickly.
Of course, at the hobbyist end of the
spectrum you can’t typically lift enough weight to be looking at
live video (though Parrot’s tablet and smartphone controlled
A.R.Drone will stream live video via its internal 720P camera with a
few hacks over the Wi-Fi hotspot it generates for itself for control
purposes – look to pay about £250). For that you need something
like Freefly Systems’ CineStar 8, an octocopter that will set you
back somewhere in the vicinity of £6000 – more with gimbals etc -
but has a payload capacity of 2.3kg, which is big enough to mount a
camera such as a RED Epic or all the various electronics you’d need
to be beaming back a live signal over RF.
In fact, there is a sometimes
happy/sometimes incandescent subgroup of fliers online busy
explaining and investigating different tweaks, hacks and
modifications so that they can pull enough juice out of various
vehicle’s batteries to power more onboard kit for longer without
melting things or crashing. The whole scene really has a fecund
Maker/Hacker vibe going.
Above that, things start to get
seriously expensive. Flying-Cam’s SARAH 3.0 is a single rotor
electric machine that filmed the opening bike chase over the roofs of
Istanbul’s Grand Bazar for ‘Skyfall’ with an Epic and can take
a maximum payload of 8kg up into the atmosphere. The company has also
developed a Pilot in Relay system, which allows a second pilot to
take over operation of the craft if it moves out of its 400m flight
control envelope. Cost for that? Considering that the only things
that take to the air between it and the full-sized, manned
helicopters with the £200k FLIR gimbals are military UAVs capable of
doing rather more (and sometimes rather more lethally) probably more
than most people will want to spend.
