First of all, we should have a Drone forum section. Why don't we have any drone posts in this forum?*
Second of all, I want a drone with a camera, that I can control from the internet. It doesn't matter if it's from a smartphone, or if the drone connects to a PC and I remote into that PC. (a drone connecting to a smartphone and me remoting into the smartphone is a pretty bad setup though)
Do you guys know anything about internet-controlling drones?
One potential use-case for this is checking your house while you're away, or potentially having a conversation with someone in the backyard without you having to walk to your backyard, or even replacing voip/videochat.
Hmm, that's an interesting one. I know a lot of current drones use comms like wifi direct. Essentially it could be as easy as piping the data stream over a cellular network instead. Obviously there would be a lot more latency introduced, however I'm not aware of anything already doing that.
you could use a raspberry pi with some way of connecting it to the internet 3g, 4g, long range wifi etc and setup a reverse vpn connection to your pc so you can access the drones wifi connection as if you were directly connected to it
Maybe you could run an android emulator on your pc, with the app that comes with the drone to control it (in case you don't want to use the controller sticks), and then you remote into that. But it's not elegant.
Drones already take care of auto-maintaining height, wind compensation etc. So there's no reason why we shouldn't have an internet control option.
I suppose there may be drone building kits and drone SDKs where you can diy this. Wish there was a product out already.
A smooth nicely packaged drone with an open standard for mounted cams and batteries, with an open SDK would sell like hotcakes. I'd program one (or 10, or a swarm) to patrol my garden lol
The problem you would run into with an emulator is likely hardware and wireless issues. Android emulators are not typically capable of direct hardware access, and I don't think that desktop/laptop wireless chipsets have all of the same wifi direct and low power stuff