Drone Design: 14 Autonomous Gadgets Taking Tech to New Heights

Their efficiency in the real world is yet to be established, but if these drone concepts and fully-realized creations are any indication, some of us could be looking at losing our jobs to robots in a range of industries over the net couple decades. From emergency responders to face-recognizing cameras, many of these autonomous flying gadgets take over tasks currently completed by pilots, construction workers, delivery drivers and videographers – but sometimes, they’re just for selfies.

Mercedes-Benz Electric Vision Van with Rooftop Drones

Designed for last-mile delivery in urban and suburban contexts, the all-electric ‘Vision Van’ by Mercedes-Benz is the first of its kind to feature built-in aerial drones that enable multiple package deliveries in a single neighborhood at the same time. This theoretically reduces the number of vehicles in any given residential area and makes the delivery process totally emissions-free. The van also features blue LED lighting on the lower body and slide-out shelving units. It certainly takes windowless vans to another level.

ROAM-e Mini Selfie Drone

What would have been seen as undeniably dystopian in previous decades is now packaged as a selfie assistance tool. The ROAM-e drone can be programmed with facial recognition technology so it follows you around like a puppy, snapping your photo or streaming live video all the while. Admittedly, the video function could be helpful, standing in for a camera operator in all sorts of settings and going where they can’t go (unless they’re secretly superheroes). The drone can be collapsed and folded to the side of a water bottle an two hours of swappable charging keeps the drone in the air for up to 20 minutes (for longer videos, switch out the battery.)

PowerEgg Drone

A small egg-shaped device sprouts propellers and turns into a personal camera drone at the push of a button. The PowerEgg by PowerVision is clean, simple and easy to transport, featuring a 360-degree panoramic 4K HD camera, advanced sensors for indoor navigation and real-time, long-range video transmission. You can snag one yourself for $1,288.

Drone Ambulance by Argodesign

Could this Drone Ambulance concept by Argodesign save lives by enabling more flying responders to hit the ground faster than a single helicopter? It’s about the size of a compact car and can land in much smaller areas, and a single pilot can manage an entire fleet of them remotely.

Trident Underwater Drone

Explore bodies of water without ever getting wet thanks to the Trident drone by Berkeley robotics company Openrov. No scuba gear and training is required when you send this portable machine down into the water in your place, and it can dive to a depth of 100 meters, sending live HD video to the surface via a thin buoyant tether. It can be controlled from the surface by a laptop or mobile device. The Trident is set to hit the market in November.

Customized DIY Millenium Falcon Drone

This DIY Millennium Falcon drone by Olivier C is a must-see for any Star Wars geek. Built upon a carbon and aluminum Prophecy 335 quadcopter, the drone features a powerful 1,100kV motor, four HQprop propellers and an 1800Ah battery with a custom frame design.

Drone Skyscraper Dock for Manhattan

Envisioning a structure that could potentially be more useful to the whole of Manhattan than the current skyscraper going up at 432 Park Avenue, which will be the tallest residential tower in the western hemisphere, ‘The Hive’ is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. The appropriately named tower is essentially just a docking and charging station for drones, which depart and arrive like bees. The design aims to get around current no-fly zones in cities, creating a vertical highway where drone traffic could be out of the way of any essential functions. The facade is designed to fit nine different types of drones according to their size, shape and landing fixtures. Is it really more useful than a condo tower for rich people? Hard to say.

evo3 Smart Construction Program

A collaboration between drone experts Skycatch and Japanese construction company Komatsu, ‘evo3’ is an essential part of a ‘smart construction’ concept using remote operators and autonomous vehicles to complete building projects. The drone goes up into the sky to scan job sites and translate aerial imagery into 3D site data, which enables fully autonomous on-site work.

Gensler MUPPette Printing Platform

The MUPPette by Gensler is a mobile 3D printer that can autonomously build small structures wherever they’re needed. Part of the ‘Printers Without Borders’ project, the Mobile Unmanned Printing Platform (MUPP) comes in various sizes for different types of projects, with the MUPPette being a hexacopter equipped with PLA plastic as a lightweight building material.

Watch out, Amazon: Autonomous delivery robots may come to Seattle thanks to Skype co-founders

You may soon see small six-wheeled self-driving delivery robots strolling around the streets of Seattle.

Starship Technologies, an Estonia-based company started by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, is meeting with Seattle lawmakers to gain regulatory approval for its 35-pound ground-based robots that deliver everything from parcels to potatoes.

The startup is already testing its robots across 12 countries worldwide and will begin a pilot program in Washington D.C. this month. Within the next four weeks, Starship will choose two additional U.S. cities where the company will deploy 15 to 20 robots that use a combination of GPS and computer vision technology to deliver items to people’s doors autonomously.

Henry Harris-Burland, marketing and communications manager for Starship, told GeekWire that Seattle is “one of our favorite candidates.” He said the company spent time this month getting feedback from random people in the city about its robots and got an “overwhelmingly positive response.”

“We would much prefer to be in a city that embraces technology and innovation like Seattle,” Harris-Burland said. “It’s a natural fit with Seattle.”

KIRO first reported the company’s interest in Seattle.

If approved in Seattle, Starship would partner with a few companies across three different industries: parcel, grocery, and food.

Starship would help make deliveries on behalf of those companies, whether it’s a few bags of groceries or a package. The robots can carry up to 22 pounds of product and travel at 4 MPH. Thanks to the computer vision technology, they can map neighborhoods to know exactly how to navigate around a city. The robots also use nine cameras and ultrasonic sensors for obstacle detection.

For initial trials, the robots are controlled with the help of humans, but Starship plans to make the devices 99 percent autonomous.

For customers, after making an online purchase with a participating retailer, they can pick Starship as their delivery option. Once the order is ready, Starship notifies the customer on their smartphone. They can call the delivery at a specific time, and the robot will make its way over. After arriving at a destination, customers use a smartphone app to unlock the lid. There’s a two-way radio on the robot in case a customer has issues.

The robots live in warehouses around a city, but Starship is partnering with companies like Mercedes-Benz for “Robovans” that house multiple robots and can move around cities.

Theft is certainly a concern, but Starship said after 8,000 miles of testing to date, it has zero reports of stolen goods. The robots are also equipped with alarms.

Starship’s pilot model for autonomous robots is similar to how Uber is partnering with the City of Pittsburgh to test its self-driving cars. Harris-Burland said there are special permissions and exemptions that the company needs to have approved, depending on existing laws.

Starship COO Allan Martinson and CEO Ahti Heinla.

“Sometimes it’s purely agreeing on location, or agreeing on what happens during certain scenarios,” he noted.

Starship’s robots could prove to be more efficient than a traditional human-powered delivery network. The company said the robots (as part of the Robovans) can deliver 400 parcels in one “shift” per day; a normal human “shift” today can do 180 parcels, it noted.

Starship said it is aiming to offer on-demand delivery for around $1 each; it charges partners on a pay-per-delivery model, or a full-service approach.

Ground-based autonomous delivery is an alternative to aerial drone delivery, whichAmazon is spearheading, though the Seattle-based tech giant is running into regulatory setbacks, making its drone package delivery ambitions difficult to achieve in the U.S. unless the company can receive specific waivers.

Both Amazon, which is starting to build its own delivery infrastructure, and Starship are using innovative technology to facilitate the “last-mile” of delivery. Asked about Amazon’s drones, Harris-Burland downplayed any competition and called them a “complimenting technology.”

“Aerial drones are very good at delivering things in rural areas; ours cannot do that,” he said. “But when it comes to city centers and residential areas, that is where delivery robots on the ground are much better in a commercial sense than aerial drones.”

Starship employs 65 people — up from 30 this past November — and has raised an undisclosed amount of investment. Heinla and Friis sold Skype to Microsoft for $8.5 billion in 2011.

“Our vision revolves around three zeroes — zero cost, zero waiting time and zero environmental impact,” Heinla said in a statement. “We want to do to local deliveries what Skype did to telecommunications.”

This drone has arms and could lift a toddler

A Japanese firm has built an aerial drone with two arms and hawklike talons that is capable of lifting objects that weigh as much as 22 pounds.

That’s roughly the weight of a 1-year-old, although you really should not use drones to transport a child or any other living thing. Seriously.

Japan-based Prodrone is marketing the PD6B-AW-ARM as the world’s first large-format drone with dual robotic arms. The hovering robot weighs 44 pounds and can fly for up to 30 minutes.

“Up to now the industrial and commercial drone market has focused on using drones for photography and filming, mapping, surveying, spraying pesticides, etc., but there is increasingly strong demand for drones to be able to directly perform specific ‘hands-on’ operations,” the company said in a statement.

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