Photo: "Check your six". You've got a quadricopter drone behind you

Published on: April 12, 2012 at 3:00 PM

That is a nice picture.

It was taken on Jan. 12, 2012, at Lauberhorn in Wengen, Switzerland, and shows a TV drone (not a quadricopter but a 8-rotor robocopter or a “Octocopter”) flying beside Canada’s Erick Guay during the second practice of the men’s Alpine skiing World Cup downhill race.

Image credit: Reuters

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Once helicopters were dispatched to provide TV coverage of the most important events. Today, such job is performed by UFO-like mini ‘bots like the one depicted below.

Image credit: AP Photo/Keystone, Alessandro Della Bella

Pirates, Beware: Navy’s Smart Robocopters Will Spy You in the Crowd (scienceblog.com)
Its a Bird! Its a Plane… Its RoboCopter in Hawaii to Keep Tabs on Navy’s Biofuel Plants (damontucker.com)
Robocopters will use new LADAR for 3D pictures and automatic target recognition (nextbigfuture.com)

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By David Cenciotti

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David Cenciotti is a journalist based in Rome, Italy. He is the Founder and Editor of “The Aviationist”, one of the world’s most famous and read military aviation blogs. Since 1996, he has written for major worldwide magazines, including Air Forces Monthly, Combat Aircraft, and many others, covering aviation, defense, war, industry, intelligence, crime and cyberwar. He has reported from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Syria, and flown several combat planes with different air forces. He is a former 2nd Lt. of the Italian Air Force, a private pilot and a graduate in Computer Engineering. He has written five books and contributed to many more ones.