Technology has completely changed the way parents can take care of their children. When I was a kid, there weren't even cellphones, now, there are webcams that automatically send email or cellphone notifications whenever something happens in the house. There are cars that can transmit their position back to an iPhone — especially useful for parents of teen drivers. In other words, it's easier than ever to keep an eye on your kids.

Paul Wallich, a contributing editor at IEEE Spectrum has taken it to a whole another level, assembling a quadcopter DIY drone that can follow his kid to the bus stop. It all started as a fantasy. "I walk my grade-school-age son 400 meters down the hill to the bus stop. Last winter, I fantasized about sitting at my computer while a camera-equipped drone followed him overhead. " He decided he'd build it himself.

Wallich settled on a quadcopter design — a helicopter with four rotors instead of the usual two — because of its ability to maneuver and hover. He bought all the parts separately, including an ArduPilot Mega (an Arduino board created for drones) for the main control board, a GPS unit, compass, and a slot for a microSD card. After assembling all the components, the drone was ready to fly. Wallich put a GPS beacon in his son's backpack so the drone could follow him. Now, he just needed a pair of eyes to watch over from the sky.

"To see the world from the quadcopter’s point of view," he writes, "you can put together a fancy video-transmission rig, or just do as I did—strap on a smartphone and fire up your favorite video chat app." Easy enough, if you're willing to wager your smartphone on your own ingenuity.

So does it actually work? Sort of. The open-source software that powers the drone can make it fly at a certain pre-established distance from the beacon and it can fly autonomously at a certain altitude through assigned GPS waypoints. Ideally, then, it can really track Wallich's son to and from the bus stop. However, external conditions make it little more complicated.

For starters, the drone struggles when it's particularly windy. The route to the bus stop is tree-lined, which makes it hard for the drone to see.

"I either have to follow automatically above the treetops—where I can’t really see what’s going on—or else supplement the autopilot with old-fashioned line-of-sight remote control," Wallich writes. "Which somewhat defeats the original plan of staying warm and dry while a drone does my parenting."

Battery life is also an issue. Right now the drone can only fly to the bus stop and back, which means that if the bus runs even a little late, Wallich has to go on a retrieval mission. For now, admits Wallich, it's back to the old technology-free days. "Until the batteries improve by another order of magnitude or so, I’ll have to do most of my watching the old-fashioned way, in person."

And in the end, maybe that's better. "The actual idea that this thing would be following him around for real, rather than for fun? I don’t think that would actually go over terribly well," Wallich told NBC.

It certainly wouldn't have gone well with 10-year-old me.

Photo courtesy of Flickr, monterlayr.