CES: Parrot’s AR Drone

posted Jan 7th 2010 10:53pm by Caleb Kraft
filed under: news

We hadn’t been here long when we stumbled upon the Drone tent. The AR Drone is a wifi controlled quad copter that has been making waves recently. We actually got to play with one a little bit. Well, sort of. There was too much interference inside for us to fly it manually, but we did smack it around a little bit while they told us about it. It was amazingly steady and strong while it tracked a target around the tent. Check back later for more videos and details.

Comments [14]

tagged: ces, radio controlled

14 Responses to CES: Parrot’s AR Drone

autobot says:

January 7, 2010 at 11:55 pm

What do you guys think an estimated price on this will be since you have a keen sense of electrical components and values on a per part basis. And when can we get our hands on the control library to begin hacking out our own controllers?

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Spork says:

January 8, 2010 at 1:08 am

I am excited, sounds like it is pretty hackable, which could make things interesting.
Thanks for the update Caleb.

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Tux-fan says:

January 8, 2010 at 2:15 am

O.k.

that’s now the second video from CES and I have feel the video miss something essential !!!

NO HACKADAY shirt
NO HACKADAY cap
NO HACKADAY batch
NO HACKADAY keychain

how knows you could tell us everything. Sitting home on the couch and pay some poor workless vegas actors :D

Show your proud!!!

We like to see HackaDay is hacking CES!
Show the vendors why they should fear you!
Or is all this a undercover mission ?!

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Iv says:

January 8, 2010 at 4:07 am

autobot : it shouldn’t be very expensive if not for the fact that it has zero competition. I think it can be as low as less than $500 but for the higher bound, the sky is the limit.

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BeerNutz says:

January 8, 2010 at 4:59 am

Just curious, what camera are you shooting this with? That is some pretty great looking video.

Thanks for your coverage and for the great site!

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aztraph says:

January 8, 2010 at 5:55 am

did he say ” i can’t wait to get one in real life”?

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pelrun says:

January 8, 2010 at 8:17 am

Well, the development kit is $1200 or so, and that gets you a *loan* of one quadcopter.

I think it’ll be a while before this will be ‘affordable’ :(

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philipp says:

January 8, 2010 at 9:35 am

Not much cheaper, but a nice alternative:
http://www.mikrokopter.de/ucwiki/en/MikroKopter/

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Calebkraft says:

January 8, 2010 at 9:38 am

We have 2 more vids for this, but the uploads keep failing. We will get them in later.

- we hadn’t checked into the hotel, so I didn’t have my hackaday shirt out yet.

- “in real life”… Yeah, Vegas is make believe land.

- cost? No idea. It can’t be cheap.

- I asked how they felt about people hacking (modding) the unit. The people there had no idea and said they would have to ask the boss. The open source part is just for making games.

- video cam was a modal zi8 HD

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kvman says:

January 8, 2010 at 10:09 am

I love the “in real life” reference, I thought it was a MMORPG reference at first… I say it all the time… thanks for the clarification…

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Skitchin says:

January 8, 2010 at 10:51 am

Caleb after the dentist!

There’s some pretty wicked bad ass tech at CES, so I’d be asking myself “Is this real life?”

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Haku says:

January 8, 2010 at 11:10 am

So it’s basically an autonomous version of the SilverLit X-UFO that’s been around for some years now ?

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TIMMAH says:

January 8, 2010 at 11:41 am

Did the X-UFO ever have any kind of lift capability? I’ve always wanted to do some aerial photography and was wondering if it would be able to take up a small digicam.