I’ve just spent ~300$ on AR.Drone 2.0 — that’s a fact.

I have set my eyes on it for a while now, especially after seeing the amazing ted talk about athletic robots.

Seeing the talk, I figured that it would be amazing to have such a drone as my eyes in the sky. Who doesn’t want eyes in the sky…

So, I bought one. Buying one when you live in a small country like Israel, is not an easy task. Amazon are not sending their stuff to Israel, and AR.Drone was not available on ebay or any other Chinese e-shops. So I bought it in one of my trips to San Francisco. I had to disassemble it and carry the big shell in my hand on the long flight back.

To make a long story short, its here now, and just over the past week we had 7 flights with it. I figured that its best to describe my impressions now before I get tired of the drone.

AR.Drone is not an athletic drone. Actually it is very far from what Raffaello demonstrated in his talk. The main drawback is that the drone does not really know where it is in space, and as a result requires constant steering and manual control by the pilot. The battery life sucks. Flight time of 12 minutes is unacceptable. Charge time of 90 minutes is even worse. We found ourselves constantly thinking about charge and fly times. Flying the drone is not spontaneous as it should. The drone is fragile and prone to crash. Made out of light-weight material, but also cheap material. This is not the best choice for a drone that has amateurs like us as pilots. My kids crashed it every second flight, and I crashed it even more. Don’t fly outside in a windy situation. You don’t have enough thrust and steering to survive even slight winds. Wifi range is not for outdoor. When flying outdoor, you need more than 50 meters range. Even at 100 meters, you are always in fear of loosing reception. Combined with points #1, #4 — good luck, you might not find it again. Flying with the camera is not an option. The camera view on the piloting application is great, but the latency does not allow flying with this mode

Not all is bad…

The drone is fun, it is built for beginners, the flight application is somewhat intuitive and performs much better than regular RC.

The reasons behind this post is to make sure that the next AR.Drone version is better than this one.

Overall, this is a good product, and I would recommend anyone to buy it and enjoy