Who let the drones out? Bot fest flies,
Teams design drones with fun power
They hover, they spin, they zoom, and with the right programming, they can do some pretty neat things. Turns out, you CAN teach a drone new tricks.
A robotics competition held Sunday in Ottawa pitted computer programmers against one another as they tried to “hack” their way to a geektastic prize.
Summer of Drones saw seven teams of three to four people compete to program drones, or robots, to perform entertaining tasks.
“The thing about the hackathon format that I really like ... is we’re only going to be writing code for six or seven hours, but people, when they’re focused like this ... can get a ton of stuff done,” said event organizer Alan Gardner, as he looked down onto the main floor of Shopify’s office, where team members were hunched over laptops or on the demonstration floor seeing if their latest programming would work.
Every team got the same drone: a four-propeller mini-bot attached to a cloverleaf foam frame. The robots were also outfitted with a video camera on the top and bottom.
Teams programmed the drones on laptops, then used them, or a smartphone app, to control the robot. The drone could also send information back to the computer, such as in the form of pictures, to program it to sense its surroundings and act on its own. This autonomous style of programming is the “holy grail” of the competition, said Gardner, a 21-year-old University of Ottawa computer engineering student.
Moez Hirana’s group designed a drone that would steer itself away from obstacles, such as walls.
“It’s supposed to not crash,” he said, only somewhat jokingly.
Tim Foster’s group, meanwhile, had a more daring drone in mind. It wanted the robot to detect hula hoops and jump through them in circus style.
Other teams were taking advantage of the drone’s image-recognition capabilities. Matt Davis and his colleagues were set on replicating RoboCop: The drone could analyze people’s faces and find certain people as instructed.
The drones were judged by two local programming whizzes, with the winners receiving a microprocessor board to continue the robotic fun at home.
When the dust settled Sunday night, the winner was Team Toushay: Sandeep Mistry, John Eke and Paul Musgrave. The trio, from Ottawa firm Toushay Inc., created a drone that could be controlled through iPhone’s Siri. Their best trick was to command it to follow someone based on facial recognition.
“It was an awesome time getting together and hacking with Ottawa’s finest — which is really what these events are about, at least to developers,” said Eke.
Meanwhile, Davis sees drone use becoming increasingly mainstream.
“I think the future will have a thousand little drones flying over our heads doing deliveries and stuff like that,” he said.
They’re already starting to invade our lives. The TacoCopter in San Francisco delivers — you guessed it — tacos thanks to an app. At a South Africa music festival, beer is hovered to concertgoers via drones.
Despite its big ambitions, Summer of Drones almost didn’t happen. The name of the event comes from an idea by the German company NodeCopter, whose original intention was to host a series of competitions in many cities. That fell through and only the Ottawa event remained. Gardner brought six sponsors on board, some sent teams, and Shopify donated the venue.
Gardner plans to showcase the competition’s videoed demonstrations at the upcoming Ottawa Mini Maker Faire.
He also hopes to broaden the competition’s scope by partnering with groups in other cities, and introducing drone programming to students. He’s currently working on a simpler version of the programming code for high school classes.
Maybe an attack of the drones won’t be something to fear any longer.