This is insanely cool, and a bit crazy too. 45 minutes to map 10km^2, so two of them, swapping out batteries, you're talking one person mapping 90 km^2 a day. So a city like San Francisco (121 km^2) in a couple of days? Or San Jose (467 km^2) in a week? That is pretty interesting. Make your own map with license to your own assets pretty reasonably I'd guess.
The laws would have to change to allow you to fly these over populated areas. There's a reason the blog post is about flying over someone's private farmland. As a commercial company you can't even charge a farmer to fly over his land, the owner of the land has to do it himself.
The need for it isn't quite as much in populated areas either, at least for OSM's purposes. Bing's aerial imagery is fairly high-resolution and timely over cities (at least cities in the western world), and they allow use of it as a layer to trace OSM features from: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing
Attach transient, disposable cameras with precise positioning to wide-ranging self-piloting lifeforms not subject to FAA approval, such as city pigeons.
While you may be kidding, such a thing with a drive by upload to a local wifi network might be possible (no opinion on practical) but basically a camera, gps module, altimiter, and wifi link. Put feeding stations on Starbucks or near other free WiFi hotspots that dispense seed if the leg unit uploads a picture.
Here's an interesting idea: drones as really autonomous entities. A script with a bitcoin account sells aerial imagery to mapping companies and uses the proceeds to pay for its own hosting and for the upkeep of its drone. It's a company that really lives "in the cloud(s)".
In our present legal environment I guess the creator would still be charged with breaking the FAA regulations, but perhaps we'll live to see the day when our children will be held responsible for their own actions :)
Easy solution. Don't charge the farmer to photograph his land. Instead charge to rent the drones to the farmer so he can "fly them himself" with supervision. Just code up an interface that gives him a big green "Go" button that sets off the actual flyover sequence.
I suppose it depends on the resolution required. Lower resolution allows you to fly higher, cover more area per picture and thus cover larger areas faster.
