Last September, Parrot unveiled its latest AR Drone, 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 relased a new quadrotor called the MiniDrone.
That's all really cool and I figured that, okay, it's going to be a while (like, a year) before we see any sort of new flying robot from Parrot. I 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. 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. It has 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. Theres also 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.
That's all really cool and I figured that, okay, it's going to be a while (like, a year) before we see any sort of new flying robot from Parrot. I 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. 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. It has 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. Theres also 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.
There is a bunch to cover in terms of what could be done with this bot. I just jump to what I see as one of the bigger applications for this, military drones. Just for recon alone, using these improvements, this would be better in so many ways.