Parrot AR.Drone

Lore & Background

The Parrot AR.Drone was unveiled at the International CES 2010 in Las Vegas, with a demonstration of the iOS applications used to control it. The main airframe is constructed from PA66 plastic and carbon fiber tubes. Two interchangeable hulls were supplied: one for indoor flight made of expanded polypropylene foam with bumpers to protect the propellers, and one for outdoor flight. The drone is powered by four brushed or brushless DC electric motors depending on the version, and a 1000 mAh lithium polymer battery gives a maximum flight time of 15 minutes. The drone was released alongside several augmented reality games, allowing users to race through obstacle courses or engage in simulated dogfights between multiple AR.Drones.

The successor, the AR.Drone 2.0, was unveiled at CES Las Vegas 2012. It is outwardly similar but has several internal improvements including an ARM Cortex-A8 processor, a 3-axis magnetometer, and an upgraded camera with 720p resolution. It also features a pressure sensor that Parrot claimed allows it to fly up to 164 ft, though flight testing by Popular Science found that the WiFi link would disconnect before reaching that altitude. The AR.Drone 2.0 was released alongside a new flight app backwards compatible with the original. At CES 2013, Parrot announced the Flight Recorder add-on, adding 4GB of storage, GPS tracking, and flight data recording, along with an extended battery designed to increase flight time by up to 50%. By February 2018, the AR.Drone 2.0 Elite Edition and Power Edition were no longer being sold.

Reader's Guide

The Parrot AR.Drone is significant as an early consumer quadcopter that popularized mobile-device control and augmented reality gaming. Its open API platform encouraged third-party development, making it a tool in research and education for experiments with visual-based autonomous navigation, autonomous surveillance, and human-machine interaction. The drone was used by Tim Pool during the Occupy Wall Street protest with modified software to stream directly to an internet channel, and he began developing a control system using a 3G chip for remote operation. In France, a Special Operations unit tested the AR.Drone 2.0 for aerial reconnaissance. The drone received a 2010 CES Innovations award for Electronic Gaming Hardware and was awarded Best Smart Product of 2015 according to Wellbots Top 25 Smart Products Ranking of 2015. Its legacy includes raising privacy concerns: in Germany, consumer affairs minister Ilse Aigner described the drone as a privacy threat and called for restrictions; a UK advertising campaign showing an AR.Drone flown into Buckingham Palace grounds was withdrawn over concerns of illegal use; and in the US, use is governed by the FAA and local jurisdiction, restricting small UAS above 400 ft.

Did You Know?

• The AR.Drone 2.0 features a pressure sensor that Parrot claimed allows flight up to 164 ft.
• By early 2013, around half a million units of the AR.Drone and its successor had been sold.