MIT professor Missy Cummings and her students at the Humans and Automation Lab at MIT Aero/Astro have developed an iPhone-app to control unmanned aerial vehicles. UAVs usually have unwieldy remote controls about the size of a briefcase.

Not only would a iPhone-like controller make soldiers’ jobs much easier, it also opens up UAVs to a whole new, non-military market. If robot control is cheap and intuitive, people might find all kinds of new uses. Cummings’ own favorite: “Being able to launch one out of the window and fly it down to the Starbucks, to tell me how many people are in line, so I know when to get coffee.”

UAV technology will definitely develop at a faster pace than my sense of ease with seeing a flying robot spying on the coffee shop I just left.