Missy Cummings on iPhone interfaces to UAVs

[John Wiseman]

After watching Missy Cummings on the Daily Show I went back and listened again to the interview with her on episode #23 of the DIY Drones podcast.  When I first heard it a few years ago she became my new favorite person: Former F-18 driver turned Ph.D., started the Humans and Automation Lab at MIT, and has a deep understanding of the technology as well as human factors and the larger cultural issues.

One thing she mentioned during the DIY Drones interview made me think a little about Mavelous:

I think our most well known project right now, that certainly has garnered the most press, is how we fly one little quadrotor micro-air vehicle with an iphone with just three minutes of training.
And it's funny if you actually go to a couple websites there's a lot of naysaying about there's no way that you could only take three minutes or less of training and fly a UAV.
And in fact it's true in fact we probably don't even need three minutes.  All we need is just somebody that knows how to use their iphone and that pretty much qualifies you.

Here's a video of their app in use: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG58zTVjoyY

Mavelous is the start of an open source interface with similar goals: A simple, useable, high-level interface to micro-air vehicles.

I've had people argue that apps like Mavelous are dangerous because they make flying a drone too easy, so it feels good to get some validation of the concept from the director of an MIT robotics lab.

John