Found Footage: Control an unmanned aerial vehicle with an iPhone
What does a former US Navy F/A-18 Hornet pilot do with her time now that she heads MIT's Humans and Automation Lab? The short answer is "really cool stuff," and the long answer is even better.
During her tenure as a pilot, Professor Cummings became frustrated with the Hornet's cockpit. "I spent whole time complaining - who was the moron who designed this thing?" she told Wired. At MIT, she and her students were inspired to consider a replacement for the huge controllers that US soldiers use to operate Raven unmanned aerial vehicles. Just six weeks and $5,000 later, they launched a working test flight of a small robotic crafted controlled by an iPhone.
The app they've created relays GPS coordinates to the robot, which then travels from origin to destination on its own. Wired notes that the phone in the video is not jailbroken and the app in question was created like any other. It's very cool indeed. Now if they could only design something to get my kids to the bus stop on time.
