Bebop better than AR Drone, but battery life limited

The latest ‘Parrot’ drone has a home button that enables it to find its way back to you like a boomerang.

Paris-based tech firm Parrot set the world ablaze when it released its camera-equipped AR. Drone in 2010. It was the first time the general public could fly an affordable drone and shoot video to, say, locate the source of a clogged gutter on their roof or create blimp-like footage of their kids playing sport.

One memorial case was the AR. Drone filming around and inside the structurally weakened Christchurch Cathedral after the earthquake.

It offered a safe way of initially inspecting damage.

The AR. Drone was also revolutionary because you could control it with a smart device connected by WiFi.

Now Parrot has released a new model. Its new Bebop Drone retains the small, lightweight form of the original but offers much more. I’ve had several sessions flying it.

The original AR. Drone had drawbacks. Its range wasn’t so great due to what was sometimes a flaky WiFi connection.

If you lost control, it could on occasions keep flying and drop from the sky some distance away. Initially video resolution was relatively low, and onboard storage for it limited.

The Bebop addresses many of these issues. It comes with its own controller called a Sky Controller, with a powerful WiFi signal that Parrot says can communicate with the drone over 2km.

That’s impressive, but there’s no way you will legally fly that distance in Australia. The country’s air regulator, CASA, requires you fly by line-of-sight. And at about 600m the Bebop is reduced to a tiny spec in the sky.

I could barely see it and I had virtually no naked-eye perception of the direction of flight.

Worse, as happened to me when momentarily distracted, I took my eyes off the drone for an instant and when I looked back couldn’t see it.

The Bebop will live stream vision to you of its travels but you can’t rely on it to locate the drone. I found on occasions that the stream froze.

Fortunately the sky controller has a home button. Give it a press and the drone will find its way back to you like a boomerang. That’s if it has enough juice left. That rescued me in a situation where the drone had begun flying over a lake.

In my tests, the battery limits you to only 10 minutes flying time, so it’s a lottery if it will get back after travelling a significant ­distance.

The sky controller has a spot in the middle for mounting a tablet or smartphone that wirelessly connects to the controller and displays live vision from the Bebop. It has left and right joysticks for flying the drone.

Press the emergency stop button and the Bebop will drop from the sky like a stone.

There’s also a take off and land button, and a camera button for shooting stills and changing the camera angle. Unfortunately the stills I shot weren’t very good, with movement noticeable. But the video retrieved from the drone’s 8 Gigabytes of internal storage was excellent quality, thanks to its 14-megapixel fisheye camera.

The camera offers a 180 degree view. You can zero in on any side of the camera while flying. When you change its direction, you’re not moving the camera, but changing which bit of the image you see.

Unfortunately, Parrot has made no headway in improving battery life. The 10 minutes you have with each battery goes quickly and you’ll spend an hour recharging one. You do get two batteries in the kit, and a third with the Sky Controller.

The Bebop comes with in-built GPS and it can also be controlled by first-person-view glasses and, soon, using the upcoming Oculus Rift vital reality headset. You’ll be virtually inside the cockpit.

These days Parrot is up against stiffer completion in the form of Chinese drone maker DJI.

The DJIs are more expensive but they are easy to fly, and you can use a GoPro camera for shooting video, or DJI’s equivalent. The Bebop will set you back $700, or $1300 with a Sky ­Controller.