This quadcopter can follow and record you autonomously

We know there are more than a few adrenaline junkies out there who love to film their crazy exploits. However this usually involves bringing a friend or camera crew along with you, but what if no one was free or what if you were doing something that would be hard for another camera person to keep up with? Well that’s where the HEXO+ drone comes in. The HEXO+ is a quadcopter project that has launched on Kickstarter. What makes it so different from the other drones available in the market today is that it has the ability to be flown autonomously. What this means is that it will be able to follow you by itself, and won’t have to rely on a pilot to help guide it along. Basically all you’d have to do is set the aerial parameters via the accompanying smartphone app, and the drone will do the rest. The drone will be able to re-position itself to the parameters that you have set, thus allowing it to track your movements and capture your action shots on video.

You don’t need a friend to carry a camera to catch all those gnarly extreme-sports moves anymore. You just need this drone and a GoPro. A Kickstarter campaign to fund the first batch of drones from startup Squadrone System is raking in money fast. The goal is $50,000. It debuted today, and people threw more than that at the campaign within two hours of its launch. Sure, unmanned aerial vehicles can be fascinating, helpful, and sometimes even world-changing, but they don’t often have the distinction of being able to fly around and follow a fast-moving person without someone minding its every move. But Squadrone’s smartphone app changes all that. It lets people set rules about how far away and at what angle the drone will stay as you ski, skate, ride, run, or otherwise move. That distinction could make waves for the filming industry, and perhaps it could lead to footage that couldn’t be shot before. The drone can fly at about 45 mph. It weighs less than 3 pounds, not including the GoPro camera that you can mount on it. One downside: It can only operate for 15 minutes at a time. But with money coming to the Palo Alto, Calif., startup at this rate, that little hiccup could soon be history. The startup expects to deliver its first drones in May 2015.