Dad builds drone to follow his kid to the bus stop

A dad has taken the notion of keeping a close eye on his kid to another level.

Paul Wallich, a tech journalist at ieee spectrum, built a helicopter drone to follow his son to the bus stop before school.

His drone project had been planned for a year.

"On school-day mornings, I walk my grade-school-age son 400 meters down the hill to the bus stop," Wallich wrote, according to CBC News.

"Last winter, I fantasized about sitting at my computer while a camera-equipped drone followed him overhead. So this year, I set out to build one."

More from GlobalPost: Drone rulebook was in the works leading up to the US election, report finds

The helicopter was strapped with a smartphone running video chat and a sensor in his son's backpack to find him using GPS.

The copter is based on the Arduino open-source programming platform, said NBC News.

The geek dad said that the two most difficult obstacles are battery life and avoiding trees.

"So 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," he wrote.

Both mean the project will remain in early stages for a long time.

There may be another factor holding advancement of the project back: angry parents of children who do not want drones getting near their kids.

More from GlobalPost: The Drone Age: A series by GlobalPost