Tag Archives: autonomous devices

The sharing economy: Uber will stop ignoring rulings

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Just came across an article in a German internet news portal. The headline claims that Uber won’t ignore official rulings anymore. That is an interesting statement. It makes it clear that Uber thought in the past it is above all and everybody. And it leads to another thought: At least here in Germany they had to stop the bullying and behave. I really appreciate that the German cities have started to take a stand and show the Überflieger that the same rules apply to everybody. The Germany manager of Uber, Christian Freese sounds now like the wolf who ate chalk. He even claims that Uber is trying to cooperate with the traditional taxi firms.

UberBlack has been prohibited in Berlin, and UberPop has been prohibited Germany-wide.

And while we talk about it: Berlin has taken a stance and is reclaiming rental space from AirBnB and similar companies. But more on the friends-rent-to-friends companies in a different post.

Some links to recent Uber articles:

Airborne Platforms

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On Friday Christian Campo and myself visited a startup company in Kassel, Germany.

They design, program and manufacture what they call intelligent autonomous vehicles, the next generation copters. The idea is that the hexa-copters can be used for unmanned surveillance missions that needed way more expensive methods in the past: One example that Joerg Lamprecht, the CEO of the company describes involves these vehicles inspecting building status or taking high-precision arial photos.

Hexa-Copter

Visiting Kassel

As with all the other manned or unmanned vehicles I’ve been dealing with lately, these machines rely heavily on the software that comes with them. While there’s a whole bunch of other issues like robustness, weight and construction, the big challenge is to provide software that doesn’t need an experienced pilot to fly around a building and take head-photos.

Logically, the company has a couple of cool software developers to provide a platform system for the copters that integrates all access to navigation, flight control, camera adjustment and such. On the other hand they are very interested in developing apps that can be used on top of the platform. These apps could be maneuvers such as loopings or turns, or it could be even more complicated tasks like ‘fly around this building in a spiral and measure it’.

Time was flying by, and just before we had to leave Joerg took us to their manufacturing hall to see a bunch of young kids building the copter platforms. After the visit I was wondering what the banks and insurance companies have to do in the future to keep their developers from running away and doing cool stuff like Aibotix is doing.

Both Christian and I look forward to the arrival of the IoT!