Drones: Not just for killing anymore

BY JASON KOEBLER

The six propellers on Doug Bennett’s drone started spinning, slowly at first and then much faster. It took off in the empty field in Leesburg, Virginia, no buildings or cars in sight. Bennett looked up towards the drone at the cloudless sky, but he didn’t need to; he was wearing video goggles that transmit a drone’s-eye view back to him.

“It’s called first-person video,” Bennett, a 20-something art school graduate, said. “It’s essentially the same thing as a military drone, from a hobby perspective.”

He was wearing a “ground station backpack” filled with cables, batteries and a video receiver–a couple hundred bucks worth of equipment—that made this all possible.

A crowd gathered around him, including his girlfriend and a handful of fellow drone enthusiasts from around the Washington, D.C. area. They grilled Bennett on how he makes it all work.

These enthusiasts–a former soldier, a Hewlett-Packard analyst, a 15-year-old science and tech student from Baltimore, representatives from the burgeoning unmanned aerial vehicle industry–make up the more than 400-strong DC Area Drone User Group, which claims to be the country’s largest and most active set of drone hobbyists. Roughly 50 of them attended the gathering in Leesburg.

Founded by Timothy Reuter, who works with USAID’s Feed the Future group, the group is dedicated to “promoting the use of flying robots for community service, entrepreneurial, and recreational purposes,” he said. Reuter makes regular appearances at drone events around town and wants to prove that drones aren’t just spying and killing machines.

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/21/drones_not_just_for_killing_anymore/