Look Ma, No Hands: This Flying Umbrella Follows You Anywhere
An engineer built a flying umbrella that uses computer vision to track your every move and hover overhead, hands-free, in the rain.
They promised us flying cars, instead we got flying umbrellas. That’s not the future we had in mind when we looked ahead in years past, but if you take it for what it is, it is pretty cool. After all, who wants to hang on to an umbrella to avoid getting soaked by the rain? That means one-handed typing on your phone and juggling your groceries, all while trying to keep the canopy centered over your head.
YouTuber I Build Stuff designed and built a flying umbrella two years ago, but it was more of a gimmick than anything else. The only way to keep the umbrella over your head was to use a remote control, which takes both of your hands and a lot more cognitive effort than holding an umbrella handle. However, I Build Stuff kept this project in the back of his mind since that time, and recently decided to finish the job of making it practical.
The new version runs a computer vision algorithm onboard to recognize the top of the owner’s head. This information is communicated to a flight controller that keeps the umbrella centered over that position. When not in use, the entire system folds up, much like a traditional umbrella, so that it can come indoors.
To make this idea a reality, I Build Stuff 3D-printed a central hub that attaches to the pole of an umbrella. Four arms attach to this hub and extend out in the four cardinal directions. Drone motors and propellers are attached to the end of each arm, just outside the reach of the canopy. When not in use, these arms can fold down.
On the hardware side, a Pixhawk flight controller with a slot for a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 was selected. This is connected to an Arducam Time-of-Flight camera, which emits light rather than simply detecting ambient light, to capture downward-facing images of the owner’s head. Using this instead of a traditional camera makes a lot of sense, as most cameras do not capture good images under the sort of low-light conditions that are found underneath an umbrella on a rainy day. The images are processed on the Raspberry Pi by an algorithm that detects the location of a head. That information drives the movements of the flying umbrella through the flight controller.
The wait for flying cars is not yet over, but at least we have autonomous flying robots that can keep us dry now. Check out the video below to see the flying umbrella in action.