Parrot to announce new drone on June 6th #ItsComing

Parrot has given us a heads-up ahead of their announcement this week which will take place on June 6th.

Parrot is all set to launch their newest addition to their drone inventory this week.

Naturally, the French drone manufacturer has only made vague hints on their website and social media as to what we can expect.

However, there has been much speculation and the rumour-mill will continue over the next couple of days. Although, we’ll have a look at what we have so far.

Parrot countdown

On the company’s main website, visitors are first greeted with a countdown. This is joined by green LED lights presumably representing a charging or flashing drone.

This animation and D-day countdown is also currently pinned to the top of their twitter account. So, there’s definitely something on its way.

All very mysterious indeed.

Earlier this year

On April 1st this year the company posted an image of a new drone asking for input to their R&D by followers.

Here is the the poster showing a drone for all weathers with the quote.

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?

Background

Parrot did make announcements back in March last year saying that it was intending to diverge from large scale consumer drone production in the light of global domination by China’s DJI.

Since then, the company has released upgrades on current consumer models in the high-end ‘prosumer’ arena, 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. It was handed 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, as well as firefighters. It not only sports a front HD camera but also a FLIR One Pro thermal imaging camera, as well as access to the 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 cleverly aimed at the drone racing market.

All in all a big year for Parrot.

So, the new drone

OK, so the big question is what will the new drone look like?

Most people seem to think that the new release will be the much anticipated Bebop 3. Moreover, that April Fool’s Sunbop vs Rainbop post could be the clue. Perhaps the new flying camera will be weatherproofed?

The Parrot community has been asking for new features to be added to the Bebop 2 for quite a while now. Funnily enough, this includes front navigation lights. A tie-in to the countdown animation?

My only gripe with the BeBop 3 scenario is that Parrot has been focusing in the commercial drone space. Why would they add a new Bebop 3, other to keep their hand in?

The only answer I can come up with is that they have a really good consumer drone ready for the world.

Could Parrot have a Mavic Air killer on its way? This would certainly shake things up. Let’s face it, if there was a drone brand out there to pull this off, Parrot would be my bet.

At the end of all of that, all we can say is, #ItsComing. Whatever it is.

Stay tuned as I have been promised updates 😉