The world is in need of something fast, light, and reliable. This technology is already developed but it is not yet reliable. Therefore, it is too early to use quadcopters in our everyday life. However, they can be used in several other ways.
Quadcopters are quite interesting. They are used as a research platform for individual researchers and university research groups, to test and evaluate new ideas in a number of different fields, including flight control theory, navigation, real time systems, robotics, and so on. Researchers usually build, modify, or observe their maneuvers to develop more stable and promising future crafts. Being a researcher for a system like this requires a very good knowledge about the dynamics and mechanics of aerial vehicles. Furthermore, test flights cannot be done in real time. Simulation software is an important tool, so that researchers can test their algorithms and theories. Anything that passes the simulation stage will be tested in the simulation indoor lab where safety is a number one priority.
Swarms of quadcopters can hover in formation autonomously, perform flying routines, such as flips, dart through hula hoops and organize themselves to fly through windows as a group. They are relatively cheap, available in a variety of sizes, and their simple mechanical design means that they can be built and maintained by amateurs.
As they are so maneuverable, quadcopters can be useful in all kinds of situations and environments. Quadcopters capable of autonomous flight can help remove the need for people to put themselves in a number of dangerous positions. This is a prime reason why the research interest has been increasing over the years. For example, a mountain climber can deploy a quadcopter autonomously and check whether he should be more careful or not while climbing. Another idea is to deploy a quadcopter in a house to check whether there are human survivors or not in case of a disaster. Autonomous operations are extremely useful in situations such as earthquakes, fires, and so on.
There are several engineering research laboratories that are currently developing more advanced control techniques and applications for quadcopters. These include mainly MIT's Aerospace Controls Lab, ETH's Flying Machine Arena, and University of Pennsylvania's General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab.
By the end of 2014, quadcopters were released in the market for the general public. As a result, crafts like quadcopters are now used to capture images and videos of areas that are rough or dangerous for humans. There are many off-the-shelf quadcopters that can follow a transmitter bracelet, which can be worn on the arm. There are quadcopters that can follow subjects without bracelets, using image recognition systems such as OpenCV. The most common commercial quadcopter is one of the copters shown in the following screenshot, and is named phantom from DJI and has already made hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales all over the world:
