Recommendations for an "Watson/Internet of things" quadcopter demo?

Hi folks, I've asked about this a couple of other places, but I thought this forum looked like it might offer some good advice as well.

I work on the watson platform services team and I'm trying to put together some cool demos to show off our APIs integrated with real-world things. I was at a nodecopter event a while back where we wrote software to fly around hacked AR.Drones autonomously, and that's what sparked this idea.

What I'm thinking right now is something that you can tell it "go find X" and it can use the visual recognition and concept expansion services to find it. I'm envisioning it flying autonomously and possibly using the tradeoff analytics service to determine where to search next.

A halfway-decent camera (preferably pointing downwards) and an internet connection are obviously required, although I'm thinking that it could have a standalone base station (Raspberry Pi or whatever) for the internet connection - that would allow it to use voice commands without so much interference from the copter's noise.

I'm also envisioning something that could work indoors, perhaps with some proximity sensors to avoid running into things, although that's not a hard requirement.

Some other notes:

• Although I'd personally enjoy soldering things and whatnot, one of the goals here is something that's easy to reproduce - so something off the shelf or at least fairly easy to assemble would be preferred.
• That said, I still have a slight preference for a standalone camera (GoPro or whatever) that could be re-used on other projects.
• I'm not sure how much of a budget will get approved.. I should probably try to stay under $2k perhaps with a few different options at various prices.

I've looked at a few different copters already including Parrot's drones, DJI's Phantom 2's, the 3DR Iris+ (I really dig this one, but it looks like indoor flight is a no-go), and a few others, but any advice or recommendations would be appreciated.

 

3DR Iris+ would be my recommendation, mainly due to their flight controllers being so easy to program to do the tasks you list. The APR flight controller can have all the additional sensors you want too and have many users who have already done a lot of the leg work to get them to work.

Check out the "3dr" forum as well..... http://diydrones.com/forum/topic/list

 

Cool, I'll check them out. Thanks!