Hello, everyone. This interesting idea from Kickstarter caught my eye. It claims to be the safest drone design currently available and I don't really doubt it. It's a quadcopter with an exoskeleton of sorts. They are currently looking for $100,000 in funding right now and seem to have some traction on social media. What do you guys think? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/107265700/xt-flyer-a-drone-has-never-been-this-safe www.xtflyer.com
Haha, why do you think so, RGJameson? The orange and white isn't so bad. The white in the video might be a prototype model
It's two guys in Florida attempting to enter the big time. I love dreamers - but the chances of any crowdsourced drone making it to the big time are about zero. I say that as someone who has invented a few things and have patents, etc. - it's a tough business! I remember hearing that only 1 in 2,000 patents ever makes a dime....or something like that.
It's a shame because some of these inventions really have a lot of value. No one else, to my knowledge, has thought of a caged quadcopter for the novice market. Flyability produces one for enterprise use
There are lots of "safe" machines which have been either proposed or created - the Parrot Rolling Spider and similar stuff protects the quad.
The caged flying ball toy is one of the applications from Gaofei Yan's patent, which as per the XT Flyer website is the same guy working on this current model. His work was also popular popular a few years ago in the toy industry. One of his applications even won the hot toy of the year by CNN Money in 2012. Check out the screencap below. Now he is turning it into a drone.
They also just released a graphic talking a little bit about their follow me function. Makes sense for them to talk about it since hitting an object in the way even at low speeds would be catastrophic for a low speed design.
