Watch a man get stunned by the Chaotic Unmanned Personal Intercept Drone (stun copter!)

You're gonna want to steer clear of this CUPID. The Chaotic Unmanned Personal Intercept Drone, or "stun copter," can deliver 80,000 volts of pure projectile terror directly into the skin of an ill-intentioned hoodlum. This is serious business for Chaotic Moon, the folks behind SharkPunch and the Pizza Hut touch table. The Austin-based design studio created the flying machine as a tech demo, but CUPID could be quickly brought to production whenever a personal security or law enforcement client sees fit. This prototype unit is based on a Tarot Hexacopter, originally designed to carry a digital SLR for video and aerial photo shoots. With a Phazzer Dragon on board, however, a few modifications made this an entirely different beast.Stun-gun drone at SXSW

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Daily Roundup: Samsung's Milk Music, a stun gun-equipped drone and more!

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

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FAA Appeals Commercial Drone Ruling, Cites Safety Concerns

Yesterday, a National Transportation Safety Board judge ruled that the Federal Aviation Administration could not fine anybody for using small, hobby-plane-sized commercial drones use because it hadn’t made any legally binding rules against them. That went against everything the FAA had ever claimed with regard to commercial drones. So in an unsurprising move, the FAA today appealed this decision.

“The FAA is appealing the decision of an NTSB Administrative Law Judge to the full National Transportation Safety Board, which has the effect of staying the decision until the Board rules,”  the organization wrote today. ”The agency is concerned that this decision could impact the safe operation of the national airspace system and the safety of people and property on the ground.”

For the time being, then, the legal situation around drones remains as murky as ever. While it seems plenty of real estate companies are shooting photos of houses from small quadcopters and they remain in heavy use for video production and other uses, the FAA continues to argue that commercial drone usage is essentially illegal.

Because it’s perfectly okay to fly these same small drones for non-commercial reasons (though the FAA would prefer it if people at least followed a few common-sense guidelines), the FAA seems somewhat out of step with reality on this issue.

The FAA wasn’t expected to make any rules for commercial drone usage before the end of 2015. Maybe all this activity around this court case now will get it to speed up the process a bit.

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Facebook in talks to buy drone company, could battle Google's internet balloons

Facebook is in discussions to purchase Titan Aerospace, a company that makes solar-powered drones that can apparently stay up in the skies for up to five years at a time. According to Techcrunch's sources, Facebook wants solar-powered drones to deliver sky-based internet access, with a view to building 11,000 UAVs to deliver data services, at least initially, in Africa. The drone company has confirmed that there are discussions with Facebook, The plan would certainly chime with the social network's Internet.org efforts to expand online access in developing countries. Of course, Google is also trialling internet access from the sky, although it's using balloons, with Project Loon offering 50 testers internet access via solar-powered helium balloons. Its experiments are currently centered on the southern hemisphere, namely New Zealand. The purchase will reportedly cost Facebook $60 million -- still, a whole lot cheaper than a messaging app.

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Source: Techcrunch

Tags: drone, facebook, internetaccess, titanaerospace Next: Myst and SimCity enter the History of Electronic Games collection .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

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Tesla's toy boat: A drone before its time

BYJon Turi19 hours ago 0

Welcome to Time Machines, where we offer up a selection of mechanical oddities, milestone gadgets and unique inventions to test out your tech-history skills.

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FAA selects six sites for drone testing because flying robots are our future

One day, drones will be flying overhead... and it will be normal. But, right now, concern over the safety of allowing unmanned aircraft to roam freely in our airspace outweighs their groovy future potential. Which is why the FAA today, following a mandate by Congress, has selected six test sites around the US for the purpose of studying UAS (unmanned aircraft) and eventually integrating them safely into our heavily trafficked skies. Research on UAS will now be carried out at facilities operated by The University of Alaska, Texas A&M University, the state of Nevada (an obvious choice, really), North Dakota's Department of Commerce, New York's Griffiss International Airport and Virginia Tech -- all chosen for their geographical and climatic diversity.

Each partner will carry out testing in key research areas highlighted by the FAA: sense and avoid, command and control, ground control station standards and human factors, airworthiness, lost link procedures and interface with air traffic control. The results of which will go towards developing regulations for "commercial and civil use" (yes, you will one day own and operate a drone). But just because the FAA's given a greenlight to further UAS testing, that doesn't mean you'll see drones whizzing about in our skies anytime soon. The agency's stressed that this is just a test and not an invitation to tempt fate in our national airspace system.

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Tags: drones, FAA, research, UAS, UAV Next: Tech's biggest misfires of 2013 .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

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