By Norman Chanon May 12, 2014 at 12:37 p.m.Hands

Last week, we attended the unveiling of Parrot's newest RC quadrotor, the Bebop Drone. Though it was founded as an audio and car accessories company, Parrot has been moving into the consumer RC toy market, starting with the AR.Drone quadrotor that it released three years ago. The Bebop will be the company's fourth RC quad, after the AR.Drone 2 and the MiniDrone that was announced at CES. The AR.Drone--sold for $300 online and at retail stores like Brookstone--was successful for the company, and Parrot clearly wants to take advantage of rising quadrotor interest with the Bebop, which will be its high-end model. Like the AR.Drone, it'll be positioned as a ready-to-fly package for consumers, competing with camera-mounted quadrotor kits like DJI's Phantom 2 but presumably at a lower cost (pricing wasn't announced).

The Bebop won't be released until much later this year, but Parrot CEO Henri Seydoux confidently demoed early pre-production prototypes for a crowd of attending press in the courtyard of San Francisco's Old Mint museum. We were allowed to fly the prototypes briefly and even demo its FPV feature using an Oculus Rift development kit. Here's what we took away.

Similarities and Differences with AR.Drone

Parrot is calling the Bebop a drone, but we all know that it's technically an RC quadrotor. It has autonomous flight capabilities that the AR.Drone didn't have, but this is a very different type of quad while won't replace the AR.Drone line. Parrot designed the Bebop with weight and safety in mind; the quadrotor is lifted by four brushless outrunner motors, spinning at much lower RPM than what you'd find on something like the Phantom. That's because the Bebop weighs much less--380 grams without its foam bumpers--and uses a three-blade design for its propellers. The motors are linked so that if one fails or is blocked, the others immediately stop spinning so the quad doesn't fly out of control.

Bebop does inherit some design elements from the AR.Drone, though. It's stabilized with the use of accelerometers and gyros, and has a vertical camera underneath its body to calculate flight speed and direction (much like an optical sensor on the bottom of a mouse). An ultrasound sensor monitors altitude up to eight meters, and the onboard GPS is used for flight tracking, but not flight stabilization (eg. it won't use GPS to compensate for wind at high altitudes). Flight time is estimated to be 12 minutes for the 1200mAh LiPo battery, which takes two hours to recharge. While that's lower than the 20+ minutes offered by the new Phantoms, we've found that we seldom sustain a single flight for more than 10 minutes without landing anyway. Flying and tracking these quads for extended durations can be mentally exhausting. One thing that's nice is that the battery is attached via a standard power connector, so third-party batteries may be usable.

You Fly with a Tablet

Bebop will be sold as two different kits: a standard model and one that comes with a discrete transmitter (we'll get to that in a moment). The standard kit is flown using a mobile app, in this case demonstrated with an iPad. That means that like the AR.Drone, flight controls are handled over a Wi-Fi connection, with the overhead and latency that comes along with it. From our experience, flight with Wi-Fi is responsive enough in close quarters, but we're unsure of its reliability and responsiveness over long distances, given the Bebop has a theoretical range of 2KM with its flight controller extender.

The app also lets you plot waypoints using the onboard GPS, a feature not available on the Phantom without the optional Ground Station accessory. Flight data can be tracked and stored on Parrot's servers, and the company isn't imposing any GPS-based flight restrictions for flying close to airports--you're trusted to abide by safety guidelines and regulations on your own.

Using the iPad, altitude and direction and controlled with an onscreen thumbstick, with lateral movement controlled with the tablet's gryoscope by tilting. We're again not confident that virtual controls can provide the same level of control (and definitely not feedback) as physical flight sticks. On the right side of the tablet are on-screen controls for the Bebop's camera.

The Innovative Camera System

This is probably the coolest part of the Bebop. It has a 14MP fisheye camera mounted on the front, which Parrot claims will be able to record stabilized video without the need for a physical gimbal. Instead, the Bebop has an on-board GPU that performs digital stabilization on the video, cropping a 1080p video from the 14MP feed. This also allows you to pan and look around using the Bebop flight app, with up to 180 degrees of view. Videos and photos are stored on the 8GB of onboard flash, and can be transferred off over Wi-Fi or USB.

The live feed from the demo wasn't clear enough for us to evaluate the video quality, but Parrot says that it's comparable to that of a action cameras like the GoPro Hero 3. The digital stabilization looked good, and it's a technology I could see being used in concert with motorized gimbals for motion stabilization in future camera systems. Panning around in the app looked like interacting with a streetview-style panorama, but with video instead of static images. When you reach the edge of the frame, curved borders and white space showed the limits of the fisheye lens, like unrendered VR space.

Skycontroller Transmitter

An second kit will come with a physical controller, called the Skycontroller. It still pairs with the Bebop over Wi-Fi, but has 4 MIMO antennas (36dBM signal strength) to extend the Bebop's range to 2Km (range is 30m without the extender). At the center of the Skycontroller is mounting dock for a tablet, and flight sticks on the left and right fly the Bebop like a standard RC quad. Buttons below the sticks automate launch and landing, which is a nice feature. Also useful: the Skycontroller is powered by the same kind of battery as the Bebop, in case users plan on buying extras.

It's also likely that the Skycontroller will cost more than your standard RC transmitter, given that it has some processing on-board. It's basically a tablet, running Android 4.2, with allows it to have USB input and HDMI video out. HDMI out will let users pipe the Bebop's video to an external monitor (as in the case of our demo) for video production purposes. It'll also allow the Bebop to be connected to HUDs like the Oculus Rift for FPV flying.

It's FPV Ready and Oculus Compatible

This was the big surprise with the Parrot Bebop announcement. Using an Android app running on the Skycontroller, users will be able to connect the Bebop to eyewear like the Oculus Rift or Zeiss Cinemizer glasses. With the Oculus, the Bebop sends a perspective-distorted video feed for the optics to "correct", even though it won't be in stereoscopic 3D. Oculus sends positional data back to the Skycontroller over USB so as you move your head, the software shifts the field of view as to make it look like you're panning the camera around. In our brief hands-on with the Oculus-connected Bebop, the video feed from the quad wasn't immediate, making it difficult to correlate our actions on the Skycontroller with movements on the quad. There wasn't enough latency to make me feel nauseous, but I definitely felt the last of presence. Video bitrate in the prototype wasn't great either, and being unfamiliar with the sensitivity and positioning of the Skycontroller sticks and buttons didn't help.

Pricing won't be announced for the Bebop won't be made until closer to release, but I would hope that it's in the $500-$600 range for what the hardware is offering. If Parrot wants this to be an appealing entry-level RC quad for consumers, it's going to have to be much more affordable than the Phantom 2s. RC enthusiasts are spending much less than $1000 to build their own quads, so this is really a product for someone who wants to buy a hassle-free kit that's ready to fly out of the box. Parrot told us that it hopes that the Bebop will appeal to younger flyers. The AR.Drone was an expensive toy at $300, so I'm hoping that Parrot chooses to use this as an opportunity to open quads to a larger market with aggressive pricing. Otherwise, I can't see a lot of parents buying this as an expensive Christmas present.

亲身实践：Parrot Bebop Drone

hands

上周，我们参加了鹦鹉的RC旋翼无人机揭幕，波普。虽然它成立一个音频和汽车配件公司，鹦鹉已经进入消费者的RC玩具市场，开始与AR.Drone飞行器，它三年前发布。波普将公司第四RC四，AR Drone 2和minidrone宣布CES后。的ar.drone--sold 300美元的在线和零售商店像布鲁克斯--成功的公司，和鹦鹉显然想利用旋翼的兴趣上升与波普，将其高端模型。像AR.Drone，它就被定位为一个准备飞行包的消费者，竞争与摄像机安装旋翼工具如DJI的幻影2却可能在一个较低的成本（价格没有公布）。

波普不会直到今年更晚些时候公布，但鹦鹉首席执行官亨利SEYDOUX自信地演示了早期生产前的原型为一群在三藩的老造币博物馆庭院参加新闻。我们被允许飞行的原型简单甚至是演示使用Oculus Rift开发套件的FPV特征。我们拿走了。

异同与ar.drone

鹦鹉叫Bebop无人驾驶，但是我们都知道这在技术上是一个RC旋翼。具有自主飞行能力，AR无人机没有，但这是一个非常不同类型的四而不会取代AR.Drone线。鹦鹉设计考虑重量和安全的波普；旋翼由四无刷电机旋转石抬起，在较低的转速比你像幽灵的发现。这是因为波普的重量少380克，没有泡沫保险杠，采用一三叶片设计的螺旋桨。电机连接，如果出现故障或堵塞，则立即停止旋转的四不失控。

波普从AR.Drone继承的一些设计元素，但。它是用加速度计和陀螺仪的使用稳定，并具有垂直的摄像机在体计算飞行的速度和方向（就像在鼠标底部的光学传感器）。一种超声波传感器监测到八米的高度，而星载的全球定位系统是用于飞行跟踪，但不稳定飞行（如不使用全球定位系统来补偿高空飞行）。飞行时间估计为1200mAh锂电池12分钟，要花上两个小时充电。虽然低于20 +分钟提供的新幻影，我们已经发现，我们很少能维持一个单一的飞行超过10分钟，而不着陆。飞行和延长持续时间跟踪这些四边形可以伤神。有一件事是好的是，电池的连接通过一个标准的电源连接器，所以可以使用第三方电池。

你飞一片< / P >

波普将出售两种不同的工具：一个标准模型和一个带有离散变送器（我们会在一个时刻）。标准的试剂盒是飞行使用一个移动应用程序，在这种情况下，展示了一个iPad。这意味着像AR.Drone，飞行控制是通过Wi-Fi连接的开销和延迟，随之而来的是。从我们的经验，与Wi-Fi航班在近距离的响应不够，但我们在长距离的可靠性和响应性的确定，给出了比波普有理论范围2km的飞行控制器的扩展。

应用程序也可以让你的阴谋利用星载GPS航点，特征不可在幽灵没有可选的地面站附件。飞行数据可以保存在鹦鹉的服务器，和公司没有实施的基础飞行限制任何GPS飞行接近机场，你信任遵守安全准则和规定自己。

使用iPad，与屏幕上的摇杆控制高度和方向侧向运动控制，用平板的陀螺倾斜。我们再次不相信，虚拟控制可以提供相同级别的控制（绝对不反馈）作为物理飞行棒。在平板右侧屏幕上的控制对于波普的相机。

创新相机系统

这可能是最酷的一部分，波普。它具有安装在前部的14MP鱼眼相机，这只鹦鹉能提供稳定的视频记录不需要物理框架。相反，波普具有一个板上的GPU执行的数字视频稳定，种植一个1080p视频从14MP饲料。这也允许你泛看使用波普的飞行程序，高达180度的视角。视频和照片存储在板载闪存8GB，可以通过Wi-Fi或USB转了。

的直播演示不够清晰来评价视频质量，但鹦鹉说它是与一个行动相机一样的GoPro Hero 3。数字稳定是很好的，这是一个技术我可以看到正在使用的电动万向在未来的相机系统的运动稳定性的音乐会。平移在App看起来像一个街景风格全景互动，但不是静态图像视频。当你到达边缘的框架，弧形边框和白色空间显示的鱼眼镜头的范围，如未抹灰的VR空间。

skycontroller发射机

< P >第二试剂盒将与物理控制器，称为skycontroller。它还具有Wi-Fi波普对，但有4天线（36dbm信号强度）延长波普范围2km（范围30m无扩展）。在skycontroller中心是一片安装码头，和飞行贴在左、右飞博像一个标准的RC四。按钮下面的树枝自动启动和着陆，这是一个很好的功能。也有用的skycontroller由电池一样波普供电，如果用户打算买东西。

也可能是skycontroller将花费超过你的标准RC发射器，因为它具有一定的处理上。它基本上是一个平板电脑，运行的是Android 4.2，以允许它有USB输入的HDMI视频输出。HDMI输出可以让用户的视频到外部监控管波普的（在我们的演示视频生产目的的情况下）。它也会让波普被连接到HUD喜欢FPV飞行Oculus Rift。

是FPV准备Oculus兼容

这是个很大的惊喜与鹦鹉比波普的公告。通过对skycontroller运行Android应用程序，用户将能够连接波普眼镜像Oculus Rift或蔡司出的眼镜。与Oculus，波普派透视失真视频饲料的光学“正确”的，即使它不会在3D立体。Oculus发送位置数据回skycontroller USB所以你移动你的头，软件转移视野使它看起来像你平移相机。在我们短暂的动手与Oculus连接波普，从四视频饲料不及时，使得它很难与我们的行动与四运动skycontroller。没有足够的时间让我感到恶心，但我觉得在场上。在样机的视频比特率不是很大，和不熟悉的skycontroller灵敏度和摇杆和按键定位没有帮助。

定价不会被宣布为波普不会接近释放了，但我希望它在500美元600美元范围内所提供的硬件。如果只希望这是一个有吸引力的入门级RC四对于消费者来说，这将是比幻影2S更加低廉。RC爱好者花费少于1000美元来建造他们自己的失误，所以这是一个真正的人想买一个无忧的工具包，准备飞出箱产品。鹦鹉告诉我们，希望博会吸引年轻的传单。AR无人机在300美元的昂贵的玩具，所以我希望那只鹦鹉选择以此为契机，打开四周更大的市场与积极的定价。否则，我不能看到很多父母买这个圣诞礼物。