Performance

The Parrot AR.Drone is the first quadro-copter drone made for fun. The quad-rotor layout means that it is totally stable in flight, and because of the two pairs of counter rotating rotors it does not require a tail rotor to maintain a course. The omission of a tail rotor assembly is great because it means that there is nothing sticking out of the fuselage (at least with the bumper type shell on).

The pitch and roll is controlled by the drone's on-board system so when you let go of the controls the drone simply hovers, which is a neat trick. It also helps with the learning phase because whenever you are about to hit something, which you will at the beginning, you can basically just let go of all controls and the drone stops in midair. Rudder functions are managed by altering the ratio between rotor speeds. The on-board electronics are handling all these functions which frees up your resources to explore new things. Within a short amount of time you will be sneaking up on people without line of sight, terrorizing friendly neighborhood kids, pesky pets or spouses. In other words great fun!

The user interface for the controls is a bit counter intuitive at the beginning because the left control is basically an on/off switch, you have to press it and tilt the phone to get the drone to fly. It would have been nice to have a pitch / roll function option where the left controls acted more like they would on a regular RC-helicopter. And while the tilt-controls are good, you always get the feeling that you could do more nimble maneuvers if you had a more regular control option.

The video feed delay is way too long to enable you to control the drone at full speed. When you can see the drone controlling it is relatively easy, once you go around a corner it becomes very hard. Some Android devices have a special Wi-Fi power draw manager, on the HTC Sensation the performance of the Wi-Fi drops quite a bit when you turn on the power optimizing features. These can be disabled by going into the advanced menu in the Android Wi-Fi menu.


Since the outdoor hull is much lighter, the drone is much more responsive. In the options menu you can set the device to outdoor mode which allows for higher speeds, faster climbing and more roll. It does sacrifice some precision in the process. Outside the AR.Drone is a completely different beast. In outdoor mode the speed is just incredible considering the level of control you have over it. Without the massive indoor hull on, the AR.Drone takes on a completely new look, and with it comes much greater performance. The 100 g weight reduction adds a lot of agility, especially when doing fast turns and quick climbs.

Gadgets

Since the Parrot AR.Drone features two cameras one would think that it is the ideal spy-plane. But as it is right now the official application does not offer screen grabbing or video recording. For this you have to dig up a custom control application. Flying the drone without line-of-sight is extremely difficult due to the video feedback delay which is 1-5 tenths of a second. The range is also an issue, being Wi-Fi it is limited to around 50 meters with line-of-sight, this drop drastically once line-of-sight is lost.

Games

There are quite a few games available for the AR.Drone directly from Parrot but they are probably most fun if you are two people each with their own drone. Right now there are several extras available that allow you to build a nice air-dome, where you get points for passing gates correctly. My only concern with the games is the video feed delay which makes it very hard to do quick maneuvers, but perhaps you can overcome it with training.

Durability

The AR.Drone is surprisingly solid for what it is. You can pull off quite a few hard landings without breaking anything, and if you do you will be glad to know that the spare parts are very reasonably priced. The big central cross section made of carbon fiber and a few other pure plastic pieces is $25 and a set of four rotors costs just $7!