The next generation of Parrot’s Bebop drone took flight today at a San Francisco launch event. Due out on December 14th and priced at $549, the Bebop 2 includes several significant improvements, including a 25 minute flight. For better or worse, the Bebop 2’s second most unique feature is the stationary fisheye lens camera system that debuted in the original model. Instead of a heavy and fragile camera gimbal system that would allow users to physically pan the drone’s camera (as seen on the DJI Inspire), the Bebop takes in a dramatically wide angled image. This makes for lighter, more mechanically resilient camera design, arguably at the expense of some photographic flexibility. For recording 1080p video, the Bebop’s remote control app allows you to virtually (and convincingly) pan within the incoming video stream beamed down to your mobile device over Wi-Fi. Photos are shot using all 14 megapixels of the fisheye system, and can later be processed on your computer for a flatter image.

Many small refinements have been made to the Bebop’s design, including more powerful motors for improved thrust and overall speed (up to 37mph horizontally) and an updated GPS chipset for greater location precision. One notable new safety feature is an emergency cut-out feature that disables all four motors if any one of them comes in contact with an obstacle (such as a human). Drones have earned a bit of a reputation as menacing, airborne weedwhackers, so hopefully this motor cut-out feature will minimize the pain of being struck by one. parrot ar drone platineIt’s also a real propeller-saver, as I witnessed more than a few crashes during the hands-on demo where the drone came away unscathed.ar drone parrot toulouse Owners of the original Parrot Bebop drone will be happy to hear that Parrot plans to eventually roll out a firmware update that will bring many of the internal software improvements of the new Bebop to the earlier model (flight stabilization and image quality among them). ar drone 2 recenzia

No specific date was given, but I was encouraged to see that Parrot wasn’t leaving early adopters behind. Ultimately, at $549, the Bebop 2 sits at a crossroads for the drone market. With its price, image quality, and feature set it’s certainly not a toy (though they make some great toy drones too). What remains to be seen is whether its unique fixed-camera system is powerful and flexible enough for photographers and videographers to choose the Bebop over the pricier prosumer-focused options on offer from DJI. ar drone 2 eladóIf nothing else, with a luxuriously long 25 minute flight time, the Bebop 2 gives enthusiasts, photographers, and videographers a lot of time to work with in the air, which is a significant consideration.storm drone ff flying platform gopro If you really want to make the most of the Bebop 2 experience, a $250 remote control rig can be purchased. drone iv bath salts ingredients

It’s called the Skycontroller Black Edition and it extends Wi-Fi range up to 6,561 feet, adds fine physical controls for both the drone and camera system, and spits out an HDMI signal that can be plugged into a pair of FPV (first-person view) goggles for a bird’s eye experience. Send this to friendYour emailRecipient emailThe new and improved Parrot Behop 2 Drone. Parrot announces a new generation of MiniDrones First look at the Parrot RNB6 in-dash system running Android Auto and Apple CarPlay First look at the Parrot Zik Sport HeadphonesDrone 2.0 Elite Edition is the connected toy you've always wanted Parrot's Jumping Sumo and Rolling Spider arriving tomorrow at retail stores Parrot's Jumping Sumo and Rolling Spider drones coming in August Parrot Rolling Spider and Jumping Sumo coming this summer Five of the coolest connected toys you can buy right now Parrot announces the Bebop Drone, a quadcopter with HD video Bluemix Takes Selfies to the Next Level With Drones

July 16, 2015 | Written by: Niklas Heidloff With the latest technology it’s getting easier and easier for people to take pictures, record videos and share them. While two decades ago only professional photographers could afford equipment to produce high quality digital media, today smartphones come with cameras which often produce amazing results. To allow people to take even more impressive pictures, selfie sticks and action cameras have become very popular. To take this one step further, personally I think drones will become more popular to take pictures and record videos from angles as you couldn’t do this before. There are already quite a few drones that specialize on exactly this use case. The application below shows an easy implementation of a Selfie Drone. While the sample below uses an older drone, you can easily imagine quality improvements with more modern drones, for example drones that have cameras facing to the bottom which can be controlled separately from the actual drone.

I tweeted the portrait on this picture which Alchemy identified The Bluemix Selfie Drone application is available as open source. The project contains an application to take selfies via a Parrot AR Drone 2.0. Via navigation buttons in a web application, the drone can be steered and a series of pictures can be taken. The pictures are stored for later review. Additionally faces on the pictures are recognized and portraits are cropped out which can be tweeted. The application has been implemented via IBM Bluemix and the Internet of Things service. The pictures are stored in a Cloudant NoSQL database. The Alchemy Face Recognition API is used to find the faces. The web application has been built via Java and Bluemix’s Liberty for Java runtime. To run the application you also need to set up the Parrot drone controller which is a Node.js application running on your notebook. This application uses the node-ar-drone module, an implementation of the Parrot networking protocols, to communicate with the drone.

To find out more about the app dev capabilities of the Parrat drones check out Parrot For Developers. To find out more about the controller check out the video by Ryan Baxter. Bluemix made the implementation of the application pretty easy. I used the IoT service because it manages the secure/reliable communications and provides a free tier up to 10 devices for testing. The service has the ability to create organizations, register devices and applications and ensure only applications that are registered to the organization can communicate to the device end points. I used the AlchemyVision Face API to identify faces on the pictures. There is a simple REST API that you can also try online. The API also returns the gender and age of the recognized people which I didn’t use in this application. It even recognizes specific people from a corpus of 60,000 well known people. I chose the Cloudant NoSQL database because it’s really easy to store the pictures as attachments. It’s also easy to create a database and the design programmatically the first time the application code accesses the database.

Plus for development purposes developers can use the database service for free as long as they use less than 20GB of data and less than 100,000 API calls per month. As runtime I picked Liberty for Java but I also could have used other runtimes like Node.js. I decided to use Java simply because personally I have most experience in Java and I didn’t see a compelling reason to use another technology. There is also a good sample how to use web sockets which I needed to display the pictures and there are also many other samples and tutorials I could leverage. I did the frontend via AngularJS which invokes REST APIs implemented in the Java application. Share this post:Share on FacebookShare on LinkedInShare on Twitter Add Decision Automation to your node-RED flows in 20 minutes A Chatbot with Watson Speech-To-Text and Mobile Analytics IBM and Box – The foundation for the new business realities Migrate Analytics for Apache Spark Notebooks to the IBM Data Science Experience

Announcing the DevOps Insights beta The Dat Project helps scientific researchers and other academics preserve and share large scientific datasets online and offline. We spoke to founder Max Ogden about the challenges of dealing with these large datasets—and with the scientists who create them. IBM Bluemix OpenWhisk is an event-driven compute platform that executes application logic in response to events or through direct invocations–from web/mobile apps or other endpoints. In line with the microservices trend, OpenWhisk has the significant benefit of supporting the decomposition of applications into as many small building blocks as needed. Do you think robots like tennis? My guess is that when the Robot Apocalypse starts, you’ll see them playing all the time. So, for the human race to survive, it will be critical for us to learn as much as we can from the large amount of data generated at the Wimbledon tennis championships and collected by IBM. I encourage you to take part in the Wimbledon Innovation Challenge.