Droning on

I've got a new toy, a Parrot AR 2 drone, and it is awesome

It's a remote-controlled quadcopter, which is cool enough in its own right, but the technology behind it is really innovative. For a start it has a wireless router on-board, so you connect to it and control it via an app that you download to a tablet or smart phone.

There are a few different control options for the drone - you can control it via a virtual joystick by pushing your thumbs around on the surface of the tablet. But you can also choose to control it by tilting the tablet - the drone will then tilt and move in the direction to match. And you can choose relative or absolute control - in absolute control the drone will move in the direction that is indicated regardless of its orientation. In other words if you want it to go left you direct it to move left, and this works whether the drone is facing towards you or away from you. 

The control is also a little different to a standard remote controlled toy because if you aren't steering it it will attempt to hold position, so it will try to correct itself when its being blown around by the wind. It also uses downward-directed ultrasonic sensors to hold the set altitude above ground level, so if you fly 'up' a slope it will gain height to maintain the same above-ground altitude. Not sure how that works if you fly 'off' something like a bridge, I'll need to find out.

All of the photos are taken with it wearing its 'inside' shell, which helps protect the propellers when it flies into something (which it seems to do fairly regularly with me on the controls). That also makes it very susceptible to wind, and in my trial runs it was pretty gusty and rough. You can see this in the attached film, recorded on the tablet via the inbuilt internal HD camera which is streamed in real time directly to the screen. How cool is that??

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xx7vOMf1cqg

The video quality is a bit poor so I'm looking at an alternative recording option (watch this space!). Once I get the controls sorted I want to try filming people on dirt jumps from the air or chasing someone down singletrack. Any other ideas?