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VERMONT — A Vermont dad came up with a creative idea to keep his son safe while keeping his own feet dry: he built a drone to follow his grade-schooler son to the bus stop every day.
The cold Vermont winters were the impetus for the project: "If I am walking my kid to the bus stop in December and January, I would really rather not be doing that," Paul Wallich told NBC News.
Wallich wrote on a tech blog that he had fantasized about tracking his son on his way to the bus stop using a camera-equipped drone, but finally decided to build one this year.
He bought the pieces to build a quadcopter and added a smartphone with a video-chat app. He put a GPS beacon in his son's backpack to enable the drone to track him.
The system has limitations — namely, Wallich has to navigate it manually around trees and up hills because it flies in relation to the GPS coordinates of his son's backpack.
He could program it to fly relative to the ground instead of the coordinates if he were willing to let it fly closer to his son, "but with the current state of the technology, unless I really changed the design a lot, I would not want it within 15 feet of my kid," he told NBC.
Wallich said he does have some fixes in the works: he is working on adding sonar units for collision avoidance and is looking at an "optical flow" sensor for better position control, according to his blog post. He's also hoping for an improvement in battery life, because current batteries only last for a single round trip.
"So until the batteries improve by another order of magnitude or so, I'll have to do most of my watching the old-fashioned way, in person," he said.