Distributed markets for drone operators
I didn't see this coming.
Drones and semi-autonomous household robots could be made to be controllable from a tablet or smartphone. Distributed markets for drone operators, some of them living in mud huts with nothing more than solar power and mesh-networks, could be very competitive! You could hire multiple operators (for pennies/per-minute) to simultaneously operate your drone (instructions are executed when two or more operators agree). You don't need to trust the operators if they're selected randomly from a pool. Payment in bitcoin. Multi-sig w/ arbitrator to handle accidents and uncompleted tasks.
Edit: It's easy to imagine a market for drone operators, with a reputation system to filter out low-performers. If semi-autonomous civilian/commercial drones never see massive adoption, then there will never be a huge demand for cheap operators. But if it does go mainstream, the pressure of cost-cutting will push down fees to operators, which leads to hiring people willing to work for less (who may be unskilled or untrustworthy individuals). So there may very well be a need for large markets that operate on a trustless basis (ie using consensus algorithms that use multiple human operators controlling a single drone).
Posted Dec 5, 2014, 5:52 PM UTC · edited
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Double cameras and 3D mapping and Oculus Rift so you can zoom in and rotate mid-flight and tell the drone to move closer for a better image
I've thought a bit about that. Set path would be like a video. Maybe you could remotely control the camera.
The biggest problem with actually controlling a far away remote drone is network latency, though onboard AI might be able to solve that and take over when necessary. Imagine a self-flying drone (or even a Google car that you can drive too) that allows you to push it to the limits of safety but stops you before things get out of hand.
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