With just under 3 days left until Parrot launches it’s newest addition to their drone inventory, any details about what the new drone will be are still a complete mystery.
While the French drone manufacturer has only made vague and mysterious allusions on their website and social media as to what the drone will be, there is much mounting speculation with less than three days left until the product is finally launched.
On the company’s main website, visitors are first greeted with a countdown, and some green LED lights presumably representing a charging or flashing drone.
This animation with a D-day countdown is also currently pinned to the top of their twitter account. Very mysterious indeed.
On April 1, 2018, the company posted a tongue-in-cheek referral to a new drone asking for input to their R&D by followers.
Source: Parrot/Facebook
Hard to adapt to climate changes due to global warming … Help our R&D department to choose the new feature of our next drone!
So, rather #SunBop or #RainBop ? – Parrot
The French drone manufacturer made announcements in March 2017 that it was intending to diverge from large scale consumer drone production in the light of global domination by China’s DJI in 2017.
Since then, the company has released upgrades on current consumer models in the high-end ‘prosumer’ end of the market, as well as a new model aimed at the precision agriculture market.
First they gave the popular Bebop-Pro and fixed-wing Disco drones some useful new features including thermal imaging and 3D cameras.
The Parrot Bebop-Pro 3D Modeling kit includes a Bebop 2 drone and 12 month licence to use Pix4DModel 3D modelling software and is aimed at architects, builders, real estate agencies and the like.
The Disco-Pro AG, as its name suggests, presents itself as a ‘all-in-one drone solution’ for precision agriculture, features the multispectral sensor Parrot Seqouia and cloud processing via AIRINOV FIRST+.
These were followed up by the Bebop-Pro Thermal and Parrot Bluegrass. Again the Bebop-Pro Thermal is aimed at the architecture and real estate market, sporting not only a front HD camera but also a FLIR One Pro thermal imaging camera and access to the new FreeFlight Thermal mobile app.
The Parrot Bluegrass also features Parrot Seqouia and AIRINOV FIRST+, but in addition to distinguishing itself as a quadcopter from the fixed-wing Disco-Pro AG, it includes 1 month’s access to Pix4Dag drone mapping software for precision agriculture.
To complete their positioning in the commercial drone space, Parrot then took SenseFly under their wing, including the Inspection 360 and Ag 360.
In the same year, Parrot also released a low price Mambo FPV aimed at the drone racing market, suggesting a secondary focus also at the bottom end of the recreational drone market.
All in all a big year for Parrot.
So the big question everyone is waiting to hear the answer for is – what will the new drone release this Wednesday be?
Some media outlets are speculating the new drone will be a much anticipated Bebop 3, and perhaps the April Fool’s facebook Sunbop vs Rainbop post is the clue.
The Parrot community has been asking for new features on a Bebop 3 for quite a while now, including front navigation lights – so does the clue lie in the flashing lights of the animation?
But given all the moves into the commercial drone space, is Parrot really going to just add a new Bebop 3?
Having reached out to Parrot via several channels we have to admit we are still in the dark as much as anyone else.
The only real clue we can find is in Parrot’s latest press release mentioning a new brand strategy and ‘a new generation of consumer drones‘.
Your guess is as good as ours – all we can say is, #ItsComing.