jpo
Macetocopter is a helipad for your quadcopter and is able to autonomously manage landing, charging and loading.
I live in a small flat in a crowded city in Spain. Here the weather is fine and windows are open. "Maceta" means "flowerpot" in spanish and this helipad is mounted in a flowerpot to sit in your window and manage quadcopters coming from outside.
Macetocopter has a camera and a small board with OpenCV for autonomous landing, radio and wifi for communications, and also charging and loading capabilities. It can be plugged or run on batteries, and of course you can use more than one (in your window, your street or your neighborhood) and sync them and start creating a new social network.
For the quadcopter it is necessary to modify its landing gear so it can show the fiducial mark to be recognizable by the Macetocopter.
The modified landing gear also has electric contacts connected to battery charger so after landing on target, it begins to recharge batteries.
Other mods to the landing gears allows payload fetching and dropping. Quadcopters battery can be in the form of payload so it could leave it and take another one that is charged. So the goal is autonomous landing and takeoff with automatic battery replacement.
Another less ambitious improvement could be making a collapsable roof to protect the system from the sun or rain. the roof is operated with a motor controlled from the computer and also has solar cells on it.
I believe this is a good approach to avoid some issues of current quadcopters while expanding its posibilities. Thanks for your interest!
andyhull
Neal
Lucas