You can really get yourself into trouble putting your expensive camera gear on a drone, Lee Morris has personally lost two drones and Chase Jarvis famously crashed his DJI Phantom into a lake in Iceland. Now Swiss researchers are looking to change all that, or at least help prevent some minor crashes. Enter GimBall: while it may not be waterproof, this drone concept is looking to change the way we approach UAV-based photography.
Engineers at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland developed v.1 of the GimBall last year and since then have introduced several upgrades that promise better performance.
The GimBall v.2 features a free-rotating gimbal camera system with a lightweight spherical cage designed to deflect the drone away from potentially damaging surfaces. Inside the cage is a simple dual-propeller (quite unlike the monstrous quad-roter setup of larger drones), stabilization apparatus, and small HD camera.
Here's a quick look at the schematics for the GimBall v.2.
It seems to me that the combination of physical limitations that a system like this would create and the rapid advancement of "smart" guidance into many drones makes it unlikley that physical precautions like this will really take off.
Though at the very least the GimBall could have helped out here:
Or here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTlFk0IZ6VY
Just sayin'.
[Via PJ Smith @ Motherboard]
This thing looks ridiculous.
Totally. It looks like a Hoberman sphere.
I thought part of the beauty of drone photography and video was the effect of flying and the near out of body experince it could simulate.
This seems almost like you're trapped in a glorified hamster ball.
While I do understand the desire for some to make it "safer", I think it kills the asthetic, at least for me.
The safety is wonderful and all but what I didn't get is that the footage you are getting from the camera inside the "ball" has the "ball" in its picture. To me this renders the entire device useless...unless I missed something...
I really like the concept, but I'm curious about what they going to use not to show the parts that are connecting the shape from the footage.
Invisible carbon parts? See through unbreakable glass? I'm not a scientist, I'm just curious honestly.
Couldn't make it to the end. A combination of dentist's drill and a Craftsmen router, beyond annoying even if it had a camera with a clear field of view.
This is the loudest kid's toy on earth.
It's hard to be wowed by this really.
1. Unoriginal - I bought a gyrocopter in a ball for my daughter 3 christmas's ago from some chinese firm.
2. Filming while your drone smashes into things instead of navigating about them? Drones with expensive camera's dont so much suffer hard landing (as most people practice without the camera) but fly out of control range.
3. Noise isnt such a biggie -unless you are doing run & gun stuff and dont want to attract officialdom as no-one takes audio off a drone but vibration is and its hard to tell how jittery this drone is even when its not smashing into walls.
4. Not sure about the cage being visible - use clear tubing maybe and set focus past it but I guess any built in cam might be wide/ultrawide .
Summary looks like a prototype for a first time family fun type christmas present rather anything significantly useful for more serious shooters.