Drones are basically flying Rorschach tests on your views of the future: rosy or dystopian?
That said, whether you think drone technology is here to enhance safety in dangerous occupations like policing — or to act as “a hacker’s laptop that can fly” (that’s a real thing) — one thing is clear: This particular drone, the Voliro Omnidirectional Hexacopter, is hella cool.
Built by a team of Swiss college students for a better part of a year (they’ve been documenting their progress here), The drone in question is a tilt-rotor hexacopter prototype, which, if you’re not a drone vocabulary expert, means it has six separate rotors, or vertical propellers, and is an improvement on the better-known quadcopters. “Tilt-rotors” work just like they sound: Those whirring blades can tilt 360 degrees, allowing the device to efficiently move at angles and hover with huge agility.
So what’s all that mean? This guy can go basically anywhere and do anything, or as New Atlas notes “it can manage a stable hover flying sideways, upside down, diagonally or any other way you care to mention.”
No word yet on whether or not a trick drone will ever reach the market, but with the rising popularity of drone racing, we wouldn’t be surprised if it took off.
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