Thursday, March 29, 2012

"Tragedies: The TacoCopter Was Just a Hoax"

Folks as disparate as the HuffPo and the Competitive Enterprise Institute were taken in. The CEI's OpenMarket blog has a wimpy retraction, the Huffington post hasn't scraped the Wired story yet.
From Eater National:
The new hotness that was the TacoCopter, the food-delivering unmanned aerial vehicle that took the internet by storm, has been revealed as a hoax by Wired.

The TacoCopter website promised "easy ordering on your smartphone" and "unmanned delivery agents" that are "fast and work tirelessly." But the dream of aerial taco delivery has been shattered: It turns out that the TacoCopter was simply a "product concept created by Star Simpson, an MIT grad" along with Dustin Boyer and Scott Torborg. Simpson admitted to creating the fake website so that he "would keep thinking about how to make something like this work."

Simpson believes it'll eventually be possible if the FAA relaxed its regulations and that "a network of command and recharging centers attached to kitchens capable of fulfilling demand orders could easily satisfy the taco delivery needs of a metropolitan area like San Francisco." For now though, no tacos from the sky.
The Atlantic is pitching the falsehood as brilliant marketing.

I'll show you brilliant. From our Feb. 2012 post "So, What Would You Do with a Swarm of Nano-quadrotors?":
I for one welcome our new nano overlords.
From the University of Pennsylvania:


Experiments performed with a team of nano quadrotors at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania. Vehicles developed by KMel Robotics