Awesome Drones

DJI’s lightweight, foldable drone shoots smooth 4K video with its 3-axis gimbal, as well as 120fps/1080p slow-motion, 32MP spherical panoramas, and HDR stills. It offers intuitive controls, obstacle avoidance, and easy cinematic flight paths. Sample footage here.

Not content to just sit around in a tub in the bathroom, The Real Life Guys rigged up a flying machine in which its pilot hangs out in a bathtub. We’re having a hard time believing this, but they’d have to be amazing VFX artists to fake this so well. More here.

On paper, the PITTA drone is a brilliantly simple idea that should have been executed sooner. It’s a camera drone with the usual automatic flying modes, but it can also be mounted and used as an action cam or a security camera. Sadly, it only has digital image stabilization.

Directors Greg&Lio shot this video for French musician OrelSan, which features a seemingly endless cast of characters for the rapper to march through. The smooth tracking shot was captured using an expertly piloted drone. The subtitled version has a little bonus at the end.

SKM has shown us some pretty awesome things you can make from cardboard. His latest build is a model of a quadcopter made entirely from cardboard and hot glue. Sadly, it doesn’t actually fly, but perfectly balancing it would probably be quite challenging.

Engineers from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have developed a novel drone which can be collapsed to 1/10th of its size, and unfolds to provide a cage for carrying small items, while also protecting recipients from its spinning blades.

We just saw a sweet video of a drone chasing down a locomotive, and now we have another awesome bit of aerial acrobatic footage as a quadcopter does its best to keep up with a couple of thrill rides at France’s Nigloland amusement park. (Thanks Hugo!)

NURK FPV and sponsor FPVDirect present some of the sweetest first-person view drone footage we’ve seen, as the pilot deftly maneuvers a quadcopter through a bridge, alongside and over a train, and turns in some thrilling loops and tricks the whole way along.

This variant of Prodrone’s PD6B-AW payload drone is equipped with a pair of 5-axis robot arms. The arms can carry up to 22lb., and are nimble enough to cut, join, flick or turn various objects. The drone itself flies up to 37mph for up to 30min. per charge.

Awesomer reader OrionFyre spotted this gem from a couple of years back, in which a wedding photographer explains how great it is to shoot nuptials with a DJI Phantom 3 drone. Of course DJI’s original video was missing the the all-important original audio track.

BioCarbon Engineering is developing a semi-automated large scale reforestation system. It uses aerial drones to map and analyze land, plant seeds in a biodegradable pod, and monitor the plants’ growth. The planting drones can dispense up to 100,000 seeds per day.

Want a really cool drone? The GoPro Karma is easy to fly, easy to carry, and offers exceptional image quality. Now you can win a Karma drone, along with a GoPro Hero 5 camera, valued at $1099. Simply drop by The Awesomer Shop today and enter to win. (Contest ends 8/24/17)

Make It Extreme doesn’t like drones spying on them, so they decided to do something about it, and fabricated an anti-aircraft weapon that uses compressed air to launch a net, ensnaring any pesky drones in its webbing. It seems a bit complicated, but it does the job quite nicely.

This compact drone folds up small enough to pack in a bag, thanks to its vertical design. It’s also got a 720p camera on board with a stabilization gimbal, and can be remotely viewed via Wi-Fi. Flight range is appx. 400 ft., with an 8 to 10 minute flight time.

Designed to carry two passengers up to a height of 4000 feet at speeds up to 70 mph, this gas/electric hybrid quadcopter is small enough to fit in your driveway, thanks to its folding blade arms. It’s made primarily from carbon fiber, and weighs just 1,100 pounds.

AmazingDIYProjects spent countless hours building this crazy loud electric flying contraption using dozens of drone motors. He captured footage of the marvelous machine’s maiden manned flight. Second flight starts at 15:30, and POV footage at 22:30. (Thanks Rob!)

Designed by a group of students from ETH Zurich and ZHdK, the Voliro is a hexacopter that has tiltable rotors, allowing it to fly parallel to walls, hover diagonally and even flip in place. The students also plan to give the Voliro an omnidirectional wheel for ground movement.

An easy-to-use personal photography drone from the masters of photography drones. The spark can take off from your hand, and follow you, and can be commanded with gestures. Its got a gimbal-stabilized 1080p camera, GPS tracking, and has cinematic flight-path presets.

We knew that drones could go fast, but not this fast. Here’s some grainy first-person footage from flyer Patrick Gaborik’s incredibly fast miniquadcopter, which has been tracked at speeds up to 145 mph. The noise the motors make sound like it’s going to rip itself apart.

Engineers from USC’s ACTLab and RESL show off a slick system for controlling numerous drones. Crazyswarm currently operates 49 Crazyflie 2.0 nano-copters, and can create coordinated aerial displays, and dynamically adapt their flight path around a tracking device.

This tiny drone is designed to make racing easy for beginners, offering up high-speed flight, but with easy-to-use controls. It streams a 720p live video feed to your smartphone via Wi-Fi, offers 3 flying speeds, and automates flips and rolls for easy showboating.

A while back, we watched CaseyNeistat hang from a drone that lifted him off the ground, but this feat is even more impressive, as Aerones used their 28-propellor drone to lift skydiver Ingus Augstkalns from a tower to a height of ~1082 ft before he lept off. (Thanks Einarr!)

Watch the season fade in and out over a farm in this short and sweet time-lapse. Photographer Will Strathmann shot the footage intermittently from 2015 to 2017. He tried his best to fly his drone on the same path then aligned the clips to pull off the transitions.