YARB Robot Blimp Offers Totally Obvious Aerial Surveillance
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Tuesday, 17 of March , 2009 at 12:46 am
When it comes to aerial surveillance, a blimp is probably not the most stealthy of platforms. But if you’re not worried about being covert, blimps offer a lot of great advantages over other things that you might find buzzing around above your head and spying on you, as DARPA and the Air Force know. Once you fill them up with helium, you don’t have to spend a lot of time and energy (relatively) keeping them aloft. Blimps can spend a long time on station very high up while carrying a large sensor package, and they have enough surface area that you can wallpaper them with solar panels to keep everything running.
Most of these advantages don’t really apply to the YARB Robotic Blimp (since at 66″ it’s about the size of an overinflated beach ball), but the good news is that you can buy a ready-to-spy model for under $1k. It has two vectorable rotors to push it around, a color video camera that downlinks via WiFi, plus support for a variety of sensors. And as you can see from the picture, the entire package can be controlled with an Android phone. The kinda sucky part is that the YARB is only really equipped to operate indoors, but it might be useful to monitor, say, your pets. As long as you don’t have free range pet birds with sharp beaks and a distrust of big pudgy robots.
The YARB comes ready to fly, just add 19 cubic feet of helium, for $875.
[ Surveyor Corp ] VIA [ Robots.net ]
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Category: Security
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