Re. calculation time: it has to be real-time and closed-loop. You cannot pre-compute everything and expect your quadrotor to fly exactly as instructed.
I really really doubt any normal cluster can calculate so many cameras almost real time... We talk about a lot of data....
And tones of math and processing...
Re. model and simulation: I'm pretty sure they started by modeling/simulating their system. But at some point, nothing replaces reality :p
I don't question weather they made a model or not... It's more than certain that they made a computer model...
What I said was that an indoor application doesn't have so many many unexpected variables thus, they could just model
it and not make that thousand dollar project for fun...
Many research project seem useless and "just fun". For instance, the first planes were just "toys", only able to fly for a few meters. If the Wright brothers were trying to build a plane able to fly from LA to Tokyo with 500+ people on board, they wouldn't have been as successful
You are right... on that... Many inversions and breakthroughs came spontaneously for various unrelated researches...
Still... Sometimes... bobble-heading over an idea is bad.... vary bad.... endless examples...
Like this one...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MotorjetThe above was a good though but bad design that didn't work out as expected....
Building quadrotors isn't easy... It requires many things, effort etc etc etc etc....
With such power consumption it's nowhere near to practical...
And some other factors make other real life designs more "human"...
I'm sorry it's still getting to this but it's like missing the right orientation...
That's an American thing...
You make bombs that can strike a target within mm... Still... Laser defenses are more and more developed by the day...
That's a fail strategy...
For many many reasons...
You should be making something that can't really be deflected... we should make something innovating...
If someone builds a quadrotor then build something else... That has more advantages and less disadvantages...
Don't go over and over the same old idea...