Drone 2.0 is by no means the best drone you can buy, Parrot deserves some credit for helping kick-start the quadcopter industry. The second version of the drone was launched at CES in January 2012, so this is effectively a three-year old quadcopter. Indeed, there is a new model which has just launched: the BeBop Drone. We'll review that soon. But price drops mean that the AR.Drone 2.0 is now a better deal than ever. See also: DJI Phantom 2 Vision+ review For under £250, you get a lot for your money. First, build quality is in a different league to cheaper quadcopters. The frame is made from nylon and carbon fibre parts, and you get brushless motors which are much more durable and reliable than cheaper brushed motors. Next, you get a lot of processing power which means you can take advantage of automatic takeoff, hovering and landing. With cheaper quadcopters, you'll have to practice for some time before you're able to hover, fly and land safely. There's also a pretty good 720p camera with a lens that has a nice 93-degree field of view.

It's not stabilised, but footage is a good step up from quads costing £50-150. You can plug in a USB flash drive and record footage directly, and there's the option to buy Parrot's "Flight Recorder" which includes 4GB of storage and a GPS receiver, although at £99 it's rather expensive. What it allows it for automatic piloting by defining a series of waypoints, something you can't do without GPS. In the box you get two hulls, one for indoor use and another - without the rotor guards - for outdoor use. Unlike some quadcopters the AR.Drone 2.0 is technically not ready to fly, though. You'll need to bring your own iPhone or Android smartphone and install the AR.There's still no official Windows Phone app but - weirdly - FreeFlight is also available for Windows 8 tablets. Even though it goes against our "we shouldn't need to read the manual" philosophy, your first flights will be far less frustrating if you do, as the controls are far from obvious. It takes quite a lot of getting used to controlling the drone by tilting your phone (physical sticks are always better), but you can optionally use virtual on-screen joysticks.

But unless you're using the live video stream to pilot the AR.Drone, it's very hard to use these since your fingers tend to drift off the controls. What's nice is that the app offers lots of advanced controls, such as limiting the drone's altitude and also its speed. If you've got more than 30 percent power remaining, you can press a button to make the AR.We found the (new, larger) battery was good for about 12-15 minutes' flying. Recharging takes between 60 and 100 minutes, depending on how discharged it is. Spare batteries cost almost £40, but there's a vibrant third-party marketplace where you can buy a higher-capacity battery (good for 20-minute flights) for £30 or less. You're also limited by the range of Wi-Fi which is noticeably poorer than most cheap drones. At least the AR.Drone 2.0 will stabilise and hover when it loses the signal, rather than flying away uncontrolled. Plus, if you fail to heed the low-battery warning, it will land itself when it's almost run flat.

So don't fly over water. At £230 from Amazon, the AR.Drone 2.0 Elite Edition is great value, and spares are easily available. Official spares are pricey, but clones are much cheaper.ar drone 2 resettenTurning the Parrot AR.parrot ar drone 2 usatoDrone into an autonomous UAVar drone 2 parrot gopro There are loads of open source quadcopters out there, but they're all a bit too DIY for me--I just want something cheap that works right out of the box. ar drone parrot trovaprezziI love the Parrot AR.parrot drone 2 partsDrone, which fits that bill, but it's not really a UAV, because you can't give it waypoints and it doesn't know where it is since it doesn't have GPS.parrot drone 2 central cross

Adding GPS to the AR.Drone would be easy if you could get access to the datastream the AR.Drone is sending back via WiFi, and there is indeed a physical port that could allow that, but Parrot has not enabled that and they don't want to emphasize that possibility for fear that the AR.Drone might get regulated as a UAV, rather than a flying toy. So rather than wait for them to turn that on, I decided to take matters into my own hands. As you can see above, I just added an ArduPilot, a GPS and an Xbee to the AR.They're powered by a tap off the balancing connector of the quad's battery, but otherwise they don't have any connection to the onboard electronics. (Note: you don't really need ArduPilot for this--you could probably connect the GPS right to the Xbee--but I'm using it right now to parse the GPS data and just send down the essentials, along with providing a power regulator for the Xbee and GPS module. But going forward, having ArduPilot onboard will let us add other sensors and do more onboard processing.)

All this setup does is send back GPS coordinates to the ground station, with an Xbee at each end. But that's enough to turn the AR.Drone into a proper UAV, since Parrot has already released software that lets you control the AR.Drone from a PC. So all we need to do is modify that code to take the GPS telemetry in from the Xbee, compare that with given waypoints, and calculate a directional vector for the AR.Drone to fly to hit the next waypoint. Then that XYZ command can be sent back to the AR.Drone via WiFi using the Parrot data standard. So in a sense, the AR.Drone handles the inner loop (stabilization) of an autopilot onboard, but the outer loop (navigation) we'll do from the ground station, along with image processing and other mission planning. Because the outer loop only needs to run at GPS speed (1Hz-4Hz), wireless latency isn't an issue. Right now, the only official AR.Drone PC ground station is for Linux (here), which is a bit over my head. But now that the quads are getting out to developers, I'm sure someone will port that to Windows, at which point I can have a go at writing the software to read the incoming Xbee data from the serial port and turn it into flying commands to send back via WiFi.