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In our new episode of the Solid Podcast, we talk with Buddy Michini, CTO of Airware, which makes a platform for commercial drones. We cover some potentially game-changing research in localization and mapping, and onboard computational abilities that might eventually make it possible for drones to improve their flight intelligence by analyzing their imagery in real time.
Among the general public, the best-understood use case for drones is package delivery, which obscures many other promising applications (and perhaps threatens to become the Internet-connected refrigerator of autonomous aircraft). There’s also widespread (and understandable) fear of drones. “We need to make drones do things to improve our lives and our world,” Buddy says. “That will get people to accept drones into their lives a little bit more.”
Other things mentioned in this episode:
- William Langewiesche’s writing on the differing “human vs. computer” philosophies at Airbus and Boeing. Here’s a great article from Vanity Fair, and his famous dissection of a 1996 ValuJet crash.
- SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping).
- The O’Reilly book Learning OpenCV 3.
- Google’s Project Tango.
- National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) accident reports, which Buddy says “always cite human factors.”
Public domain image on article and category pages via Rijksmuseum.