Parrot’s Rolling Spider and Jumping Sumo minidrones for indoor fun

PARROT’S smartphone-operated flying minidrones — Rolling Spider and Jumping Sumo — are suited more to indoor use.

AT last, flying toys I can terrify my fellow journalists with in the ­office.

Unlike the big Parrot AR Drone 2.0 that we still fly in parks around Sydney, Parrot’s smartphone-operated minidrones — Rolling Spider and Jumping Sumo — are suited more to indoor use.

It will be up to your organisation’s health and safety rules whether these drones see the light of day anywhere near your office — but, if not, you can play with them at home.

The two toys we reviewed are different in what they do and how they connect to your smartphone.

The Rolling Spider is a quadcopter drone. In flight, the noise from its four tiny propellers sounds like a menacing swarm of bees and, for this boomer, brought back memories of that 1978 low-budget horror epic The Swarm .

The Spider can be flown with or without a set of large wheels. Without the wheels the Spider is faster, but the propellers are odds on to get damaged during crashes you inevitably will have while learning to pilot.

Those tiny propellers rotate at a mean rate, so I wouldn’t fly it anywhere near children or even close to adults without the protecting wheels.

With the wheels attached, the Spider can crawl up the walls and run along the ceiling — here at The Australian’s office, however, it did come a cropper when it became entangled with a light fitting.

I did fly the Spider outdoors, and this certainly is possible. With hardly any wind blowing I took it to its maximum 10m height and took overhead selfies using its downward-facing 60 frames per second stability camera. The photo resolution is basic, just 0.3 megapixels, but OK.

You retrieve the stills through the Parrot Free Flight 3 smartphone app or when you connect the Spider to a computer by USB.

But wind is the enemy of such a light device and you can quickly lose manoeuvrability and find your Spider on collision course with a tree if the weather isn’t so perfect.

The Rolling Spider connects to your phone or tablet using Bluetooth low energy. Don’t go looking for the connection in your list of Bluetooth devices in your phone’s setup, as it isn’t there. Parrot’s app handles the connection and provides the means for piloting.

The Bluetooth low energy connection paired without incident and was stable. It worked well, but at 20m away I lost the link just as the Spider was hovering above the heads of a bunch of newsroom subeditors — not a good thing.

The app is available now for Apple and Android devices, with Parrot promising a Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 version by mid next month.

The piloting experience using the app is similar to the big AR Drone. In normal mode you have two sets of controls. You move the drone backwards and forwards or left and right by placing your right thumb on the right-hand control and angling your phone or tablet. You use the left control to increase and lower height, or rotate the Spider left or right.

If you don’t like this setup, there are two other piloting modes: “ace” for advanced users and “joypad”, which lets you video the Spider in flight as you fly. In practice, I couldn’t pilot the minidrone with any dexterity and make a video at the same time. It’s a big ask.

The big problem is battery life. You get only six minutes from one battery — if that, and they take 90 minutes to charge. Parrot gives you a second battery, but you can charge it only when it’s in the Spider. I’d be getting a few more.

Parrot needs to take another look at its battery technology; flying time on standard batteries, even with its big AR Drone, is just 10 to 12 minutes.

Giving mini­drone users a battery charger capable of recharging, say, four cells at once would be some compensation.

Looking somewhat like a miniature moon buggy, the other toy, Jumping Sumo, doesn’t fly, and it doesn’t use Bluetooth low energy because it needs more bandwidth. It has a forward-facing camera that streams to the app in real time.

It’s a WiFi device and you connect to it from your WiFi settings on the 2.4 gigahertz or 5GHz bands. The downside is you can’t be connected to your home or workplace WiFi at the same time.

Unfortunately I found the connection flaky on two test units. I could connect the Sumo to Wi-Fi but the app would connect and quickly disconnect. Then it would be OK. Then it would be disconnected again. I used an iPhone 5S and an LG G3 Android phone as controller.

You pilot the Sumo using the same FreeFlight 3 app you use for the Spider, but you can now see where you are going thanks to the forward-facing camera stream. The Jumping Sumo jumps vertically, and forward and up — a bit like a long jump.

If you practice enough, the Sumo can jump from the floor on to a chair, then to a table. It will also spin and bow. Getting the acrobatics going is a simple button press on the smartphone screen. It’s very addictive.

The Jumping Sumo will record video, but you’ll need to attach a fairly unusual micro-USB flash drive as memory or use a USB to micro-USB adaptor with a regular flash drive. That’s not practical.

You get a little longer battery life from the Sumo — more than 10 minutes using the same rechargeable 550 mAH lithium polymer cells used with the Spider. Again, you have to charge for 90 minutes for 10 minutes of joy.

These toys are lots of fun and the Rolling Spider, in particular, will introduce you to the concept of drone flying, albeit on a miniature scale.

Both are available in Australia.

Rolling Spider
Rating: 8/10
Price: $139.99

Jumping Sumo
Rating: 7.5/10
Price: $219.99