Skip to main content

This drone parachute automatically deploys itself if it detects a stall

smartchutes drone parachute kickstarter 150514 0001
Image used with permission by copyright holder
The first time I ever flew a drone, I crashed it — and it wasn’t a small tumble either. I was helping my colleague Nick Jaynes shoot some aerial video for a Ferrari review, and the first scene we had planned was a badass rising shot captured from the edge of a bridge. When we had everything in place and Nick gave me the signal to start shooting, I confidently pressed the record button on my controller.

…But it wasn’t actually the record button. Turns out I had the controls mixed up in my head, and instead I pressed the kill switch while the drone was in midair. Oops! After that little mistake, I had the pleasure of watching the $1,500 camera drone plummet over 100 feet straight down — off the edge of a goddamn bridge, mind you — and slam into a rocky hillside at terminal velocity. We eventually managed to retrieve the drone and do some field repairs to get it working again, but ever since then, I’ve admittedly felt a bit of anxiety whenever I send a drone up into the air.

If you’ve ever crashed a drone yourself, you probably know the feeling — but luckily there’s a new project on Kickstarter that might help alleviate some of the uneasiness that comes with flying. SmartChutes, as it’s called, is a clever new parachute attachment designed specifically for small multi-rotor aircraft. Clip it onto your drone, and it’ll prevent catastrophic crashes.

The system is pretty straightforward. Under the hood, SmartChutes is equipped with a set of gyroscopes and accelerometers. Whenever these sensors detect that the drone is falling (or has gone 90 degrees past horizontal) they automatically deploy the spring-loaded parachute, which slows down the drone’s descent, and (hopefully) reduces the damage it experiences when it hits the ground.

SmartChutes only exists in prototype form at this point, but if creator Michael Pick can raise $25K before the end of May, he’ll be able to bring it to production. Back the project now and you can get your hands on a SmartChutes system for about $130. If all goes well, Pick hopes to begin shipping to backers as early as October.

Editors' Recommendations

Drew Prindle
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Drew Prindle is an award-winning writer, editor, and storyteller who currently serves as Senior Features Editor for Digital…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more