As you may know, if you follow the activity of Networld, our projects are fast changing and mainly only proof-of-concepts or projects with the purpose to improve the skills of the members. More general speaking we have a wide range of started project that are not really finished.
Now we have another great looking project… it is all about autonomous drones. On the base of the mirkokopter.de chipsets we fiddle on a Quadrokopter Prototype that final purpose should be to find human beings in crisis areas (e.g. after snow-slides or earthquakes).
The role of Networld is to develop a ground station that is able to evaluate the gained raw data, classify them and decide how to coordinate the helper on the ground and support them with useful information (e.g. picture of the ground, hotspots where hurt people are, …). As you can see on mikrokopter.de the hard- and software of the Quadrokopter is pretty good working. That allows as to focus on more higher level parts such as reasoning on the base of real time information from the drone. As reference platform we will use a Android Client (Smartphone and later maybe a Tablet) that allows us to control the Quadrokopter manually and in a later step semi-automatic.
In my eyes it is not a total new project from our perspective. As in our “Future House” project the main component is the context evaluation and the meaningful reasoning on this gained data. That means before we can work on a smart home or drone we have to focus the context handling part and build than on the base of the developed algorithms and implementation the software that suites for the concrete scenario.
Sometimes you have to make a detour to reach your goal.
About Alex Oberhauser
Alex Oberhauser’s current private and professional interests are Research and Development in the area of Semantic Web and Service Oriented Architecture with the focus on the applicability of new technologies in real world scenarios. He is founder of the meta project Networld and the Crisis Information Platform Sigimera (http://www.sigimera.org).
