I've got my own flying drone. I'm basically the CIA and a spaceman all in one civilian package. I'm going to fly a drone, I'm going to get arrested, and I'm going to be a hero." After pulling one of Parrot's AR Drones out of the box and experiencing this understandable reaction, you start to think about what you're really dealing with—a flying robot, controlled by your phone, with a camera that records the world below as if you're sitting in a tiny cockpit.An affordable four-prop remote-controlled drone with an HD camera and a wide-angle lens.Aviation dabblers who want to look over their neighbors' fences.DesignAn insectoid pod, about one square foot, with an orange color scheme near the toy end of the aesthetic spectrum.Using ItThe first minute is magical—with a single button press, your own little drone hops a meter into the air. And just sits there. Next, you fly that fucker right into a wall.The Best PartIt's a flying drone with a built-in camera. You own a drone.Tragic FlawNeither of the cameras—the front facing 720p one or the lower-resolution cam that points straight down—are any sort of magic.

(Think cell phone camera from 5 years ago.)The tilt-to-control flight interface is so instinctive that it is borderline overwhelming. best ar drone modIt tilts just like I tilt my phone?the parrot ar drone priceTest NotesFlying an AR Drone makes you feel like a robotic Peeping Tom crossed with a cybernetic monk with a splash of soon-to-be-killed Call of Duty side-story operative.ar drone motor reparierenI broke the hell out of the Styrofoam indoor hull pretty much as soon as I started screwing around with it.ar drone parts for saleYou can buy replacement hulls for about $45—a lot of scratch for something that's almost certainly going to be trashed multiple times, especially by a novice. ar drone parrot usb

(Good news: glue is still available.)I lost it off the roof of a midtown NYC building. I let it fly too far away from me and it stopped responding to my commands. rc uav predator drone for saleIt drifted slowly in the breeze until it ran into a building and fell about 20 feet onto a skylight. ar drone 2 arduinoFrom there, I was able to get it to respond, and I guided it onto the ground. The claimed outside range of the Wi-Fi connection—200 feet—isn't as far as you might think.Parrot didn't seem very on the ball when it came to actually supporting its product after its launch, as a quick scan of the AR Drone forum will uncover. Not all the features promised in the 2.0 version have been released yet; updated firmware has actually caused drones to "drop altitude abruptly"; developers trying to use the AR Drone API complain of a lack of feedback from Parrot engineers.

It didn't engender a lot of confidence in your $300 purchase. (Parrot seems to have improved in the last couple of weeks, having released new firmware.)There are some really interesting hacks—especially ones that turn the AR Drone into a hunter-seeker. Others can track objects, or even follow you like a pet. Why hasn't Parrot hasn't included those out of the box?If you really want to buy a drone to capture high-quality footage, you'd be better off buying a rig purpose-built for it. Some $1,000+ models now have six-axis DSLR mounts as options (and the horsepower to haul them).The app can save video files to your phone (and even upload them to YouTube), but another option is saving directly to a USB stick that can be nestled inside the flight body. This saves at a higher bitrate, with no potential dropped frames due to Wi-Fi issues. One caveat: finding a USB stick that the AR Drone will recognize. It took me a few before I found one that would record—and I happened to have a hot crash right after plugging it in.

Unfortunately, I don't have video of that crash. The hard shut-down disrupted the writing of the file. Sometimes having a record of your big failure can ease the embarrassment.The indoor hull's four Styrofoam hoops, meant protect the rotors, break with very little force. How about thin loops of wire? Flexible but sturdy plastic ribs?Should You Buy It?As far as drones go, you're not going to get much more accessible or inexpensive as the AR Drone. But it's still three bills—and Parrot's shortcomings on service aren't instilling consumer confidence. Updated software is meant to fix the loss-of-altitude problems that have plagued the first runs. But since my test drone is waiting on replacement gears (due to an unfortunate decision to let an intern attempt to fly it on the High Line in Manhattan), I can't verify if Parrot has worked out all the kinks. Flying a drone is a lot of fun, and you can get some decent video out of the Parrot's camera. Provided you have the disposable income and free time to justify it, the AR.

Drone 2.0 is a satisfying purchase. Whatever you do, just be prepared for the inevitable crash—and the possibility of lost footage or additional costs to repair the damage.Drone 2.0 SpecsCamera: 720p 30fps HD Lens: 92-degree diagonal wide angle Processor: 1 GHz 32-bit ARM Cortex A8 Weight: 380 grams with outdoor hull; 420 grams with Styrofoam indoor hull Motors: 4 brushless 14.5-watt, 28,500 RPM inrunner motors Battery: 3 elements 1,000 mA/hour LiPo rechargeableLast September, Parrot unveiled its latest AR Drone upgrade, the Power Edition, with longer flying time and new colors, and the company also revealed it was hard at work testing a new GPS autopilot system. Then early this year at CES, Parrot released a brand new quadrotor called the MiniDrone. That's all really cool and we figured that, okay, it's going to be a while (like, a year) before we see any sort of new flying robot from Parrot. We apparently underestimated Parrot by a lot, because last week, they gave us a look at a completely new drone that includes a bunch of unique features that are totally worth getting excited about.

The new Parrot quadrotor is called Bebop, and we have it on good authority that it was not named after the mutant rhino from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. With Bebop, Parrot is focusing very heavily on incredibly awesome, feature-rich video, as evidenced by the gigantic, 14-megapixel camera with fish-eye lens attached to the front part of the drone: And here's what is interesting about this big camera: the sensor has a field of view of 180 degrees, but when it sends video to the user's phone or tablet, it uses only a smaller subset of the available pixels. In other words, the drone streams video by subsetting a 1920 x 1080 pixel rectangle (about 2 megapixels worth) out of the 14 megapixels that the sensor covers. Why does it do that? To be able to perform two neat tricks: Digital image stabilization: the drone uses a 3-axis accelerometer, a 3-axis gyroscope, and a 3-axis magnetometer to digitally compensate for movement. If there's some turbulence and the drone rolls a bit, it will adjust the video to compensate, taking advantage of all of the extra pixels that the sensor has available.

We saw a demo of this, and it works for both small vibrations and giant movements, including putting the entire drone over through a 360 degree roll while it keeps giving you a stable, right-side up video. It's very impressive, and all done onboard with an integrated GPU. Digital panning: the drone's camera is fixed, meaning that ordinarily, to look up and down or size to side, you'd have to yaw or tilt the entire drone. Instead, you can pan and tilt the video by just changing the area of the sensor that's being used, such that you can look almost completely up or down or side to side (within 180 degrees) just using the sensor, without the drone moving at all. In addition to the digital image stabilization, Bebop's camera is completely isolated from the frame and the motors by anti-vibration bumpers, which are the orange things in the image below. The bottom of the drone also gives a good look at the four 2.4/5 GHz ceramic Wi-Fi antennas, the ultrasonic altitude sensor, and the little downward-pointing camera that uses optic flow for stabilization and speed estimation.

The other big news is the new controller that Parrot is (optionally) pairing with the Bebop drone. The Parrot Skycontroller is essentially a big tablet dock with a dedicated drone interface. Those are honest-to-goodness R/C-style analog control sticks (YAY!) along with a ludicrously powerful 36dBm a/b/g/n/ac directional MIMO quad Wi-Fi antenna that can talk to your drone (and stream video from it) from up to two kilometers away. Oh, and it runs on the same battery pack as the drone does, which is a nice touch. If it sounds like all of this is just asking to be worked into some sort of immersive drone piloting experience, Parrot is way ahead of you, and they've already got an operational demo of drone control via Oculus Rift: It's a little bit of a hack, but the really cool part is that head movement when you've got the Rift on syncs up with the digital panning, so you can look around while the drone remains stationary. There's a lot of polishing that needs to be done, but the potential is very exciting.

The bad news in all of this is that the battery life on the BeBop is just 12 minutes, but it's easy to swap the battery packs to keep on flying. We can also report that the drone crashed a whole bunch of times over the course of the demos that we saw, and it emerged unscathed. If you're a terrible pilot, the BeBop has integrated GPS (which also receives Galileo and GLONASS), and can autonomously follow waypoints as well as returning home by itself. Parrot has not yet announced pricing for Bebop (or for the controller), but they're aiming to be competitive with other drones designed for video capture, without replacing the AR Drone for consumers or hobbyists. Our guess would be somewhere between $600 and $800, although we're of course hoping for more affordable as opposed to less. And we have no idea what the controller is going to retail for, although we desperately want one, and if Parrot opens it up (and they've suggested that it'll be compatible with "most open-source drone control software"), we could see it becoming the control system of choice for any serious drone user.