George Orwell is rolling in his grave: This drone has built-in facial recognition tech

By Kelly Hodgkins Published April 5, 2016

Like it or not, selfies are here to stay, and the technology surrounding this form of self-photography is on the rise. The latest trend in the selfie movement is autonomous shooting, which was kicked off last year by the Lily drone. And the latest selfie drone to join the growing fleet of camera-equipped, self-tracking drones is the ROAM-e from Australian technology company IoT Group.

The ROAM-e drone is described as “a selfie stick on steroids” by IoT Group executive director Ian Duffell. Shaped like a water bottle to allow it to fit in big pockets and bags, the dual-blade cylindrical copper has a 5-megapixel CMOS camera and a quad-core ARM Cortex M4 processor that handles facial recognition and other flight computing tasks. It even has folding rotors that pack tightly for transport and storage. Because it carries a small camera and is designed to fly at low altitudes, the ROAM-e is on the compact side, measuring only 85mm at its widest point when folded.

Recommended Videos

The selfie drone can be connected to a smartphone and programmed to follow a user via its onboard facial recognition technology. The drone can track the user unassisted at a distance of up to 25 feet and circle the subject, providing a 360-degree panorama view. Like any well-behaved drone, the ROAM-e will hover in place if it loses sight of its target and will wait there until it sees its subject again. Besides autonomous selfies, users can obtain a more theatrical effect by dropping a point on the map and programming the ROAM-e to fly to that point and return. It also can stream live video to a connected smartphone or tablet during its 20-minute flight.

The ROAM-e is priced at a very reasonable $349 and is available now to order from IoT Group’s website. Orders placed now will deliver within 12 weeks.

Former Contributor

Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…

Topics

Emerging Tech

LG says its AI found a new hair-loss ingredient after searching 420,000 candidates in a day

LG wants AI to do more than chat—it just used one to find a hair-loss ingredient

LG EXAONE Discovery Hair Loss Ingredient Featured

Most AI demos still involve asking a chatbot to summarize an email, generate a picture, or even get medical advice on occasion. LG has a new assignment for the tech, and it's about finding a better cure for hair loss. LG AI Research says its EXAONE Discovery system screened more than 420,000 candidate compounds in a single day and helped identify an ingredient called Rhamsydil in collaboration with LG Household & Health Care.

Developed with LG Household & Health Care, the material is being investigated for hair-loss care and is already being prepared for commercialization. LG says Rhamsydil could help with female-pattern hair loss by creating a scalp environment more conducive to hair growth, with plans to use the ingredient in products from its Dr.Groot scalp-care brand.

Emerging Tech

Scammers are teaching AI to sound like you, and research says our brains are falling for it

Has your accent just become a security vulnerability? AI scammers are getting too good at sounding local

Scammers are turning trusted news brands into investment traps

The next scam call you receive may not sound like a robot, a call center, or even someone pretending to be your relative. AI voice generators have become capable of reproducing regional accents and dialects that sound convincing enough that researchers are warning they could become a potent social-engineering tool.

For example, a scammer could use an accent familiar to a targeted community to make a suspicious call sound considerably more trustworthy.

Emerging Tech

Scientists found a way to turn plastic bottles into cookies you can actually eat

hand holding a cookie

Plastic bottles and cookies rarely show up in the same sentence, but a team of researchers just gave us a reason to talk about both together. According to Science Daily, scientists at Southern Illinois University Carbondale have engineered yeast that can turn waste from plastic bottles and old crop leftovers into real food ingredients and create cookies.

The work began as part of a NASA program exploring how astronauts might produce their own food during deep space missions, since resupply runs from Earth aren't exactly realistic that far out. The researchers' big insight was simple: plastic bottles are packed with carbon, and so, as it turns out, is food. That single connection became the foundation for everything that followed.