We featured Parrot’s AR.Drone 2.0 in last year’s holiday gift guide. Once our model, Ashley, was done taking pictures with the foam-shielded quadcopter, we snatched it away, took it outside, and started flying it around our cul-de-sac using Parrot’s app for iOS. Now, given what an iPhone can do, the software is pretty nifty. But control certainly wasn’t what I’d call natural, smooth, or even intuitive. It was a lot of flicking around the phone’s screen, trying to get the drone to go where we wanted. Obviously that would be a total waste on the Shield’s touchscreen. So, there’s now a Shield-optimized version of the AR.Freeflight software that lets you control the drone using joysticks. It’s a completely different experience. I’m pretty sure I completely drained the Parrot’s battery five times just trying to get initial impressions written up. In the video below, I handed Shield over to my father, who proceeded to nearly run me down with it. But hey, whatever, he was having fun.

Of course, you retain all of the on-screen functionality, like automated take-offs and landings. Shield’s five-inch screen is also where you see the camera’s 720p output, and where you’re able to start a recording. But the two joysticks take care of control. The right stick is tasked with up/down and rotation, while the other one banks left/right and pitches forward/back. Shield would make for a very expensive (and not altogether comparable) remote control, on top of the $300 AR.But if you were already planning to buy Shield for its more primary purposes, and Parrot’s quadcopter was on your wish list, know that the combination is so much more fun than using an iOS- or Android-based smartphone to fly. Nvidia just announced that, instead of availability this week, its Shield handheld should be available at some point in July due to a recently-discovered issue with part of the device. More from us when we receive the updated unit!LAS VEGAS — Parrot's popular AR. Drone quadcopter will be getting some major improvements this year with the rollout of GPS tracking, longer battery life, better steering and revamped video recording capabilities.

That seems like a lot to cram into a new reiteration of the AR. Drone 2.0 prototype that is on display at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show, but a demo conducted for Mashable on Sunday revealed the update is really something for fans to get excited about. With promises for a launch "sometime this year," Parrot said the new battery will allow the quadcopter to fly for 18 straight minutes — six minutes longer than its current flight time. parrot ar drone ncixThe battery will be available as an upgrade purchase (price to be determined), and it will come with the new model as well.parrot ar drone non si connette "We extended the battery because it's something a lot of people asked for," a Parrot spokesperson said.parrot ar drone 2 spare parts

It will also tout a GPS "Flight Recorder," which is a GPS receiver with 4GB flash memory that records flying perimeters. This means you can visualize your flight route on the map flights in 3D. It's also shareable with others. The accompanying app, which is used to steer the device, will also get an update. A new feature called "director mode" will give more control to steering with the help of pre-registered and automatic movements. This is a huge improvement over the current model, where movement and turns are often bumpy and hard to control. ar drone 2 teknikmagasinetInstead of moving your mobile device from one side to another, you will be able to hit a button to make it move forward, stop abruptly, turn around and pan. where to buy ar drone in south africaIt also makes shooting videos easier to stabilize, and editing tools allow you to clean up shaky shots and colors.drone machine buy

The app games AR.Race 2.0 and AR.Rescue 2.0 — which allow you to race with others — will also be revamped to reflect the latest updates. More CES 2013 Coverage Mashable CES Favorites 2013An autonomous flight library for the AR.Drone 2.0, built on top of Instead of directly controlling the drone speed, you can use Autonomy to plan and execute missions by describing the path, altitude and orientation the drone must follow. Autonomous means that this library will move your drone automaticaly to reach a given target. Experiment with this library in a closed/controlled environment before going in the wild !! Extended Kalman Filter leveraging the onboard tag detection as the observation source for an Extended Kalman Filter. This provides much more stable and usable state estimate. Camera projection and back-projection to estimate the position of an object detected by the camera. Currently used to estimate a tag position in the drone coordinate system based on its detection

by the bottom camera. PID Controler to autonomously control the drone position. Mission planner to prepare a flight/task plan and then execute it. VSLAM to improve the drone localization estimates. Object tracking to detect and track objects in the video stream. This module exposes a high level API to plan and execute missions, by focusing on where the drone should go instead of its low-level movements. Here is a simple example, with the drone taking off, travelling alongs a 2 x 2 meters square ane then landing.( (, ) () {. Here is a list of know apps built using autonomy. Please let me know if you build something and I'll be happy to add you in the list. panorama autonomously fly to a given altitude and take pictures to form a 360 photo panorama. If you encounter issues, please add them to the issue tracker. me on twitter (@eschnou) or on the #nodecopter IRC channel This work is based on the Visual Navigation for Flying Robots course.

My eternal gratitude for their team to post lectures and slides on the web. I learned a lot from them. Also a big thank you to @felixge who came up with this crazy idea of flying a drone with Javascript and building the fantastic node-ar-drone library. If you like this project, please consider donating. The less time I need to work, the more I can spend on open source projects :-) Please Donate To Bitcoin Address: [[address]] Copyright (c) 2013 by Laurent Eschenauer laurent@eschenauer.be Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in