LANDroids Get Wings
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 5 of March , 2009 at 4:17 am
I’ll come clean: there are two things wrong with this headline. Pretty hard to pull off in a three word headline, right? Yeah, I’ve got skillz. Firstly, there are no wings involved (although rotors are technically wings I suppose), and secondly, these helicopter routers aren’t actually related to DARPA’s LANDroid program, although they operate on the same general principle. Designed for disaster zones and other areas, these quad-rotor UAVs with WiFi routers mounted on them can autonomously deploy a wireless network (both data and cellular) in just a few minutes, over virtually any sort of terrain. Made from off the shelf parts, the bots are designed to be easy to build and (above all) cheap… The infrastructure is only about $400.
The biggest problem, as perhaps you’ve already anticipated, is power. The batteries for these UAVs cost three times as much as all of the rest of the hardware combined, and still only provide about 20 minutes worth of up time. The idea at the moment is that the UAVs will locate positions to perch and then act as nodes from there, which is reasonable enough in some situations, but it crushes my fantasy of a little UAV that follows me around providing high speed internet everywhere.
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