2013/07/14

[科技新知] The astounding athletic power of quadcopters

Weeks ago, my colleague saw a very interesting video on Ted. He sent me the link and I'm really excited. The reason why he sent me was because we ever discussed the future of the video system month ago. Everyone raised different ideas of the device and my idea is the quadcopters with camera on it.

Why I wanna do such kind of device is oriented from my study in university. I've been studied the mechanics in Aeronautics and Astronautics department, bachelor plus master are total 6 years. There is less such kind of career opportunity in Taiwan because of the environment. Lots of my classmates join the semiconductor industry to be equipment engineers in the company like TSMC, CMO...etc. A little part including me choose different road to be R&D engineer in other industry.

My first resume is to apply a mechanical engineer but my destiny lead me to be a software engineer in surveillance system. Fortunately, I witness the most important period of surveillance. It's from the close system to open system, then open system to smart system. An significant change is the infrastructure of IP network growing rapidly. The network technology overcome the bubble in 2000 and reform the play rules in lots of industry. The open system gradually become mature and we head the future for smart one.

The quadcopter is one example of such kind of devices.
The link: http://www.ted.com/speakers/raffaello_d_andrea.html

I was impressed for the first demo of the inverted pendulum, this is the basic control experiment when in school. Now it was realized on a quadcopter, what amazing! My original thinking is just patrolling from one base station to another but now is far beyond my imagination. Both M2M and H2M are totally implemented in this video. Machines can self-repaired, catch ball, even co-work with each other to finish task and interactive with people. This is a new era of the smart devices not only on smart phone. The time frame from network bubble to now is 10 years and I thought the smart network/device is another 10 years at least. Let's keep our pace on it.