Parrot has rolled out two new quadcopters, the Parrot Bebop-Pro Thermal, designed for thermal inspection professionals, and the Parrot Bluegrass, suited for farmers.
According to the Paris-based drone company, the Bebop-Pro Thermal is a multipurpose quadcopter that allows construction companies, rescue services or solar panel installers, for example, to carry out inspections by using two embedded cameras – an HD, 14MP video camera and a FLIR ONE Pro thermal camera.
Based on the company’s new Bebop 2 Power quadcopter, the Bebop-Pro Thermal is used with the Parrot Skycontroller 2 long-range remote control and the Parrot FreeFlight Thermal app, which transmits and analyzses images from both cameras to a connected tablet. At any time during flight, the pilot can switch from a thermal image to an HD image, record video footage and store captured content to the drone’s 32 GB of memory.
The thermal camera, weighing 36.5 grams, is equipped with two sensors: an RGB sensor, capturing what the drone can visibly see, and a thermal sensor, measuring temperature differences. Data from both sensors is combined by the FreeFlight Thermal app.
Parrot says the $1,500 drone package will be available in November. The company previously announced the new drone in May as part of the launch of its Parrot Professional range of business solutions, which include the Disco-Pro AG and Bebop-Pro 3D Modeling.
As for the Parrot Bluegrass, the company is launching its first quadcopter designed specifically for agriculture.
This aircraft is also equipped with two embedded cameras: a video camera and a multispectral sensor. The HD video camera helps farmers visually monitor infrastructure, land and herds, for example, but with the Parrot Sequoia sensor, farmers can detect problem areas in crop fields. The embedded Parrot Sequoia automatically records images of crops in four distinct spectral bands (green, red, red-edge and near-infrared) and offers 64 GB of internal memory. It also has a luminosity sensor that records lighting conditions and automatically calibrates collected data with the multispectral sensor data.
According to the company, the Parrot Bluegrass, weighing 1.9 kg (approximately 4.19 lbs.), can autonomously cover up to 30 hectares of land at 230 feet in the air on one battery charge. It can also fly at lower altitudes for fruit crops, for example.
The new drone offers flight planning through Pix4Dcapture and data processing through the AIRINOV FIRST+ cloud platform. Though it can fly autonomously through Pix4Dcapture, the drone can also be piloted manually through the included Parrot Skycontroller 2.
The $5,000 Parrot Bluegrass package will also be available in November.
