Controlling drones via tweets may soon be possible

Twitter wants users to control drones with micromessages. The company filed for a patent in June, which recently became public, that outlines a way to control drones through online services, allowing the UAV to send data and receive commands. TechCrunch reports that this method of control was previously developed at a hackathon before Twitter decided to patent it. This technology would open up a lot of potentials for individual drone owners, but it seems Twitter also wants it to be a means of crowdsourcing drone behavior.

With micromessage, “UAV control may be determined through democratic means,” according to the patent abstract. This could be useful for large venues, parties or similar places where it would make sense for multiple people to interact with a drone. By tweeting to a drone, for example, a person could have a picture taken and upload it automatically to the linked Twitter account. This would make sense for promotional reasons such as allowing fans at a sporting event to have photos of themselves from the drone uploaded to a public Twitter account.

Of course, controlling a drone through message services means the drone needs to be connected to the Internet. There are not a lot of drones with this capability. There are some such as the Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 that have Wi-Fi for the purpose of wirelessly sending video down to a storage device. A number of drones can be controlled via Wi-Fi, something China manufacturers offer such as those from IMG Electronics.

Controlling drones with smartphones would be nothing new, but connecting to them through an online service would add more complexity to the mix. Additionally, Wi-Fi signals might not be strong enough for all cases. This would require 4G LTE-equipped drones. LTE likely would not have the same bandwidth available from a strong Wi-Fi signal, but it could be more practical for communicating with drones over the Internet, and a lot of bandwidth would not be necessary for sending and receiving messages over Twitter. The AR.Drone was able to be equipped with an LTE modem and flown for a kilometer while streaming 720-pixel video, so an LTE connection can still be quite capable even if with lower bandwidth.