They call it “juggling,” which, I must say, in deference to all the jugglers out there: it ain’t. But “catch” is still an extremely impressive addition to the extremely impressive list of extremely impressive stunts which quadrotor UAVs have been pulling off recently. Filmed at the Flying Machine Arena research facility at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich. [via adafruit]
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I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.
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That’s damn cool! so how come Maker store/shed (or sparkfun) or any of the usual suspects haven’t got a quad-rotor kit out yet? just supplying the motors, props, beams, and leaving the rest to us would probably sell pretty well.
“No products match your search criteria, please try again.”
Check out the Arducopter project:
https://code.google.com/p/arducopter/
Technically it is juggling, just one ball juggling. Which, honestly, was about as far as I ever got either. And I wasn’t flying at the time either. They aren’t actually catching the ball at all (no capture event), so that’s also a misnomer here. Automated badminton practice?
Whatever, freaking cool regardless of terminology used!
Back in my nerdy juggling days, we had a rule that it counted as juggling if: # of objects > # of hands in use. Since these things have no hands, 1 ball satisfies that rule. Of course juggling also involves catching so…
Maybe this is more like quadrotor hacky sack.
Who cares, though, because it awesome.
People “juggle” a soccerball using their feet – this is exactly the same (and completely awesome)