Sony announced that it will stop selling the Airpeak S1 camera drone. Sales of the product will end on March 31, 2025. Sony will also stop selling most of the drone's accessories next year, but replacement batteries and propellers will be available until March 31, 2026. Inspections, repairs and software maintenance will continue through March 31, 2030. The Airpeak S1 was initially introduced during a virtual presentation at CES in 2021.

Why not give drone piloting a try? Now's a great time to do it since you can get the Ninja Dragons Blade X 4K Dual Camera Drone on sale for $120 off. As the name suggests, this quadcopter drone offers two cameras, a 1080p HD front camera and a 720p secondary camera to capture a broad view of the landscape and take photos and video from the sky. You can watch the camera feed in real time and control the drone with the included remote control or gesture controls. The remote has a 120-150 meter control distance while the electronic stabilization system ensures you always enjoy a stable flight.

If you've ever wanted to get into drone piloting but you felt it was too expensive to justify the hobby, then you've come to the right place. This long-range, high-speed 4K camera drone is designed with a modular large-capacity body battery that's easy to install and supports a significantly longer flight time than other drones on the market. It's also stabler than other drones, with a smart hover function to stay solid during windy conditions and a 360º stunt roll to amaze and delight onlookers down below. Of course, the 4K camera can capture high-quality images and videos as you fly with ease thanks to headless mode and one-key automatic return. With the companion app, you can take photos with the point of a finger and the included remote control allows you to go beyond the one-button beginner flying mode to navigate from greater distances.

Black Friday is a special time of year when you can save on all kinds of cool stuff, especially tech. But why wait until Black Friday? We're dropping Black Friday deals early throughout November, so every Friday feels like Black Friday. If you've ever wanted a drone, this early Black Friday sale features two for the price of one. This Dual Camera Drone Bundle by Ninja Dragon is on sale for 67% off -- no coupon necessary.

Ring's Always Home Cam is an indoor security camera drone. Ring on Thursday introduced a new product to its growing roster of smart home devices -- the Ring Always Home Cam. Unlike the Amazon company's other security cameras, the Always Home Cam is a flying camera drone that docks when it isn't in use. The Ring Always Home Cam will be available in 2021 for $250. Along with this hardware announcement, Ring says you'll be able to turn on end-to-end encryption in the Ring app's Control Center "later this year" in an effort to improve the security of its devices.

Amazon has announced a full range of new spherical Echo devices, new motorised smart display, a camera drone that flies around your house, a game-streaming service and more. In a streaming presentation, the firm showed off a smorgasbord of new devices from its various brands, including Ring, Eero Fire and Echo. The new standard Echo ditches its cylindrical shape for a fabric-covered ball design with Amazon's characteristic light-ring in the base to indicate when it is listening to you. It has a new 3in woofer and two tweeters with Dolby processing for stereo sound and automatic adjustment to the acoustics of your room. It also has Amazon's new AZ1 artificial intelligence chip for greater local processing of voice and other actions for increased privacy and speed.

Parrot was one of the first (if not the absolute first) companies to take a crack at the consumer drone space. The AR Drone came out in 2010 (!), and Parrot followed it up a solid upgrade in the AR Drone 2.0 a few years later. Since then, we've seen the Bebop, some clever flying toys, and had a bunch of fun with the fixed-wing Disco. But at this point, most consumers probably think DJI when they think of camera drones, because of how pervasive Phantoms and Mavics are. It's not like this caught Parrot by surprise or anything--two years ago, they saw the direction that the market was trending, and started working on a completely new consumer platform designed to be exceptionally easy to use and exceptionally portable, with the ability to produce exceptionally good aerial videos. Earlier last month, Parrot announced the Anafi, a US $700 consumer camera drone with a unique design and some unique features, coupled with the sort of thoughtful usability that we've come to expect from Parrot. We got a pretty good look at the drone in New York City, and have been trying one out over the past weeks. At Parrot's event in NYC, CEO Henri Seydoux introduced the drone with pictures like this: The idea, Seydoux said, was to build a drone like an insect, with a head (camera), thorax (electronics), and abdomen (battery).

This terrifying footage shows what it would be like to be eaten by a great white shark. Researchers got more than they bargained for when a great white shark took a bite of the underwater camera drone they were using to film in the Pacific Ocean. The resulting footage shows a shark powering through the water, before attempting to swallow the drone in a single bite. Inside the mouth of the predator, the camera continues to film and shows the muscles inside the shark's jaw contracting with effort. The shark eventually spits out the camera and swims away, defeated.

Over the last few years we've seen more camera drones than we can count, but getting the best footage out of them will take something extra. While many big budget productions are already using drone cameras, a system developed by MIT and ETH Zurich researchers goes beyond mere Steadicam or even subject-tracking, by allowing the director to define exactly how a shot is framed. Specifically, it lets operators specify where an object or face should be in the frame, which direction it should face and how large it will appear, while also accounting for obstacles in the environment. That way the drone can calculate an appropriate flight path on its own, weighing the various factors against each other to get the best shot each time. The researchers will present their findings at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation later this month, but for now, directors will have to keep begging Roger Deakins to shoot their next project.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Back in June, IHMC posted a video of ATLAS walking on the edges of rotated cinder block all placed in a line. This latest video shows the robot walking on the edges of cinder blocks that have also been rotated in the horizontal plane, giving the robot's feet less surface area to work with: There's one more dimension to add before ATLAS will be walking on randomly positioned cinder blocks, and we're expecting to see the real robot handling point contacts soon as well.