Out at CES this week, plenty of French startups are showing off their latest and greatest hardware, and few are more well known than Parrot AR Drone. The Paris-based company’s hovering drone has spawned meetup groups dedicated to hacking the device, resulting in such hacks as adding a video to the device to follow one’s son to the bus stop. Today at CES, however, Parrot is taking it one further, and has added Flight Recorder to the flying hardware.
With 4Gbs or local storage, users can record video of their AR Drone’s flight path, as well as using a built in GPS to track it’s trajectory. The startup says that the new capabilities will open up a variety of new use cases for the AR Drone, such as a Follow The Leader style course-imitation game.
As has been the case up until now, I suspect it will be the AR Drone that ultimately determines the utility and optimal use-cases for the new technology, strapped to the startup ecosystem’s favorite quad-copter.