AR Drone - quadcopter intercepting communication of other quadcopters

Unmanned aerial vehicles with four rotors, the so-called quadrocopters, are something more than expensive and entertaining toys. Inexpensive, relative to the cost of other aircraft, and universal flying robots, quadrocopters with might and main used by military and civilian organizations for operations on exploration, observation, photography, and as flying scientific tools. Despite all the attractive sides of quadcopters, their control systems allow you to perform only a limited number of actions. And in order to draw attention to this problem and demonstrate the empowerment of quadrocopter systems, a DroneGames competition was organized, the participants of which present their quadcopters with unusual and unique capabilities to the competition.

The organizer and sponsor of the DroneGames competition is the American Groupon system, which, moreover, provides the premises for the competition. In addition to Groupon, the Windows Azure and NodeCopter organizations act as organizers. Nine teams took part in this year’s DroneGames competition, and the jury, which included such well-known personalities as Chris Anderson, founder of DIYDrones and 3DRobotics, Dale Doherty, founder of MAKE, and Andreas Raptopoulos (their Andreas Raptopoulos), one of the founders of Matternet, as well as several other people. The jury's assessments were based not on the technical complexity of the projects implemented, but more on the unusual nature of the invention itself and the results of its application.

The third place was given to the project “TooTall Nate”, due to which the quadcopter’s control distance becomes almost endless due to the Verizon MiFi mobile equipment installed on the device. Due to this, it is possible to control the drone from any distance, as long as it remains in the zone of reliable cellular coverage.
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The second place was taken by a team of newcomers from Stanford, who demonstrated an unusual system that allows you to manage a group of quadcopters of completely different types from the same computer.

And the first place in the competition DroneGames received James Halliday (James Halliday), who wrote a virus that works in the control system of the aircraft and infects all the drones that fall into the zone of the radio transmitter of an infected device. Infected drones go out of control and go crazy. But, if we discard the “evil” component of the present invention, it can turn out to be a very good system of online software updates for a group of unmanned vehicles that are working on a single task.

This competition has all chances to become very popular in the next few years. And on TechCrunch, you can find several videos shot by participants of the competition, although their quality leaves much to be desired.