Bitcraze, the company behind the Crazyflie open source nano quadcopter, posts release notes, hardware announcements and developer how-tos.
HN commenters point to it as the home of the Crazyflie, a tiny drone with open source hardware, firmware and software, though one found it fragile.
Overall, designing physical things, building working prototypes of novel stuff, and designing factories for large scale production are each an extremely vast domain, at least as large as the whole of computer science and software engineering. They cover literally thousands of specialized disciplines and skills.
Typically, people specialize in some facets of the above. And even seemingly simple products usually require teams of specialists with complementary skills to implement them starting from scratch.
For some mainstream products which are well understood and are much discussed, it may be possible to take an existing open-source design, modify it, and then outsource actual fabrication to a contract fabricator. As a concrete example, one can take a complete design of a small quad-copter [1], learn as much as one wishes about its real time firmware, about control theory and flight dynamics, about electronic circuits, motors and propellers, radio protocols and technology, etc, and get a taste of what it takes to replicate such a product.
A completely different scenario is to focus on one relatively narrow technique which can be mastered in a reasonable time. For example, in this video [2], a legendary software developer makes in his garage a form for injection molding a plastic spoon. So one can do the same. Buy a small machine tool, and using on-line tutorials and help from strangers on-line,learn how to use it. After several years of tinkering it is possible to develop…
Crazyflie is a tiny flying PCB, original version from ~2013 (no camera)
https://www.bitcraze.io/
And yes, it is not very robust, I broke one PCB arm but could fix it without affecting the balance too much.
The bigger problem was encountered when it flew out of reach. I had an xbox 360 controller connected to a xbox wireless dongle on my laptop, running crazyflie SW, connected to crazyfly via another dongle. Tested it in a city park (somebody attended to the laptop).
I moved a bit away from the laptop setup while trying to learn to fly it (manual leveling is hard). I don't know which wireless connection failed first. But the result was, it just kept running the last instruction, and flying up, up and away. Luckily the battery failed when it was up about 50-100 meters, and had drifted away about 100m horizontally due to wind.
I was sweating like hell, picturing scenarios of it coming down on a car windshield and causing a surprised driver to crash, etc.
Luckily it came down within the same park. Without new damage to drone, or third parties!
Lessons learned: Don't fly an indoor drone outdoors, it's not built to resist wind and doesn't have SW safe for it. And never, ever fly any drone outdoors without model plane liability insurance.
Probably, but I am not convinced it would work. According to their article their smallest drone category is the size of a small child.
That means the crazyflie (https://www.bitcraze.io/crazyflie-2/) is entirely outside of what they are considering. Which is too bad because it is pretty fast, computer controlled and absolutely tiny. Yes its take of weight is only 42 grams meaning you can pack about 15g of c4 on that thing and land it on somebodies head.
Now I am not sure 15g is enough to do any serious damage, and I don't know if you can alter it to use frequency-hopping jamming-prof radio but I do know this: technology only gets better, faster and smaller.
And it would really ruin my day if I was to hold a speech and 15g of c4 went of right over my head - especially since the attacker has a real chance of getting away with it.
The quad these guys are using is a Crazyflie. Small, mostly prebuilt, targeted at researchers.
It has a few "addons" like optical flow sensors and external position trackers that let you extract ground truth attitude/position, which is helpful for research like this.
Not really "off-the-shelf," but it's a good thing to get if you care more about the controls, learning, trying new algorithms stuff more than sourcing parts, getting RC receiver/tx, sizing motors, that kind of thing.
https://www.bitcraze.io/products/crazyflie-2-1/
Author of the referenced work here. I have to disagree with this, at least with the motion tracking system part. The optical flow deck [1] works like magic and can maintain low drift positioning even when doing relatively fast and agile maneuvres.
For an example you can have a look at our video [2] (e.g. the disturbance rejection tests at 3:00 and after are solely using the optical flow deck)
[1] https://www.bitcraze.io/products/flow-deck-v2/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRD43ZA1D-4&t=198s
This looks really cool, but tbh when I saw the name micro drone I expected something crazyflie-sized[0] more than this.
Which is not a complaint, by the way! The crazyflie is so small that it becomes quite the limitation in a few ways. Really curious how the slightly larger size of the ArduBee compares in practice - probably has a bit more stability and power.
[0] https://www.bitcraze.io/products/crazyflie-2-1/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law