Parrot Disco Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

It’s a drone! It’s a plane! It’s a Parrot!

At CES 2016, the Paris-based wireless technologies company revealed the Disco, a first-of-its-kind, ready-to-fly wing-shaped drone for consumers. Back in January, it was still a project. As of today, Parrot announced Disco is on its way for $1,300, which roughly converts to £990 or AU$1,700.

Like its Bebop quadcopters and line of Minidrones, Disco is designed to be something anyone can pick up and pilot. It’s a lightweight fixed-wing aircraft (it’s less than 700 grams or 1.6 pounds) made from flexible plastic foam with a single rear propeller strong enough to get the Disco up to about 50 mph (80 km) for flights up to 45 minutes.

Joshua Goldman/CNET

A system of sensors inside — accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, barometer and GPS/GLONASS, plus a pitot tube for airspeed — help newbie pilots stay in the air. Parrot even gave the whole system a catchy name: CHUCK, which stands for Control Hub and Universal Computer Kit.

CHUCK makes it possible to simply toss the Disco into the air like a Frisbee and have it automatically ascend to 50 meters (164 feet), at which point it will fly in a circle until you give it a command. Once you’re up, turning left and right is as easy pushing a direction on the control stick, and the same goes for changing altitude.

For the Disco, Parrot shrank its supersized Skycontroller available for the Bebop drones. The new smaller design is closer to a controller you’d get with a toy drone, but the Wi-Fi MIMO remote control still has a theoretical range of 1.2 miles (1.9 km).

Part of the size reduction is because the smartphone/tablet mount is gone. Instead, the Disco comes with Parrot Cockpitglasses, a first-person-view (FPV) headset that, once you insert your smartphone, gives you a view from the full HD camera in the nose. If you need to see something on the ground while you’re flying, the Cockpitglasses can switch to the view from your smartphone’s rear camera.

Parrot

You can still pair the controller with a smartphone or tablet (iOS or Android) and use the FreeFlight Pro app instead of flying by FPV. Along with a live view with telemetry, the app interface lets you set speed, altitude and distance limits and your wireless and photo/video settings. The drone also captures photos and video to 32GB of internal storage.

The biggest difference between piloting the Disco compared to the Bebop quadcopters is that it can’t hover in place or fly straight back or to the sides — the Disco is constantly moving forward. Because of this, Parrot lets you set a geofence to keep it from flying off. When it hits the set boundary, it will automatically return it to you.

There’s no sense-and-avoid system either, so if you’re headed straight for a wall or tree you’re on your own. Landing can be done automatically, with the drone coming down in a spiral the same way it goes up. Or you can manually land it, with the pressure sensors underneath helping to bring it in smoothly.

Also, if you want to skip the autopilot stuff, you can bind the Disco to a regular RC transmitter and pilot it in a full manual mode.

We’ll be taking it out to fly and I’ll be back with soon with some hands-on impressions. If there’s anything specific you’d like to know, though, drop it in the comments.