Sony’s Wicked Aerosense Camera Drone Takes Off And Lands Vertically, Tops 106 MPH

Here at Hot Hardware, we come across a lot of interesting aerial drones. We recently reviewed the Parrot Bebop Drone and brought you news on DJI’s Phantom Standard 3 drone, which features a gimbal-mounted camera that can shoot 2.7K HD video.

The drone market is flooded with entries from numerous, highly capable companies, but what happens when a storied company known for its consumer electronics devices steps into the drone fray? Well, you get the Aerosense, a drone company that was formed by Japanese robotics firm ZMP and Sony.

Aerosense’s latest product, however, isn’t your run-of-the-mill quad-copter which seem to be a dime a dozen these days. Instead, the dual-rotored drone acts like a miniature Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey in that its rotors are positioned horizontally for vertical take-offs and landings, and pivot into a vertical position for horizontal flight.

In level flight, the Aerosense drone is capable of traveling at an incredibly quick 106mph. In addition, the drone can stay aloft for up to two hours and future versions will be able to carry up to 22 pounds of cargo (Amazon is likely salivating at the prospects of deploying a whole squadron of these fast and highly capable drones for its Prime Air drone delivery service).

Aerosense ultimately plans to market its autonomous drones to business customers for surveying, inspection, and observation duties. Customers would of course be able to input specific locations that need to be covered and the drone’s onboard cameras would survey the area. Images captured by the drone would then be automatically uploaded to the cloud using Sony TransferJet technology.

Aerosense CEO Hisashi Taniguchi believes that his company would be able to take on the likes of market leader like DJI and record revenue of roughly $82 million by the year 2020.