A Free-Falling Camera Robot for Filming Skydivers

In the context of things that are dangerous for humans to do, jumping out of an airplane tens of thousands of feet in the air and relying on a combination of fabric and string to keep you from plowing into the ground at a double-digit percentage of the speed of sound seems like it could certainly be one of the more dangerous (even if in reality it isn't). While humans aren't likely to stop doing this anytime soon, autonomous robots may be able to help by mitigating the risk somewhat, offloading hardware and tasks from skydivers to themselves in a chubby little orange package called the Freefall Camera. The Freefall Camera (FFC), which David Alatorre Troncoso and David T. Branson III from the University of Nottingham presented this week at IROS 2017 in Vancouver, is an attempt to autonomously film skydivers in free fall. This is useful for a few reasons: First, it means that skydivers aren't carrying their own cameras (these can get caught on the things that attach you to your parachute, which have a significant amount of importance in avoiding death). And second, it means that one skydiver doesn't need to carry or point a camera if a group of skydivers want to record themselves doing synchronized maneuvers and tricks, which I guess is what happens when just jumping out of an airplane stops being exciting enough by itself.