After the AR Drone, it’s been a while since Parrot came up with anything seriously cool. Until now.
At CES 2014 in Las Vegas, the French-based company revealed two new toys, one is a two-wheeled robot that can jump onto tables and pick up things called the Jumping Sumo and the other is a mini flying drone aptly named the Mini Drone that has almost all the cool features of the AR and should be cheaper too.
The premise of the two new drones are similar to the AR Drone in that they are controlled using your smartphone or tablet running either iOS or Android.
The Jumping Sumo has two independently driven wheels allowing it to turn on a dime and a mechanism that can launch it up to 2.5 feet into the air. The device also has a built-in camera that can stream footage to the device controlling the drone.
The Mini Drone comes with a two-wheeled attachment that allows it to roll along as well as fly. The drone looks to be able to detach from its wheeled base to go to fly. Being much smaller, and hopefully cheaper than the AR Drone, the Mini Drone has some drawbacks — it doesn’t have a camera and you get a measly 8 minutes of fly time from a single charge. 8 minutes of fly time is ridiculous short but judging by the promo video after the jump, it looks like a whole lot of fun.
The Jumping Sumo and Mini Drone will be released later this year. Price has not been announced at the moment.
