Xiro Drone is back on Nuremberg’s Toy Fair and expands it’s drone portfolio heavily. In our report on the company’s Toy Fair presentation in 2015 they had only one drone at display. Since then the company (which has renamed itself from Zero to Xiro) did a lot of development work and is likely to have four different multirotor products on the market in 2016 (see interview video below). The Xiro Xplorer drone will be continued and refined in the details. It’s new sister model Xiro Xplorer 2 comes with a slightly changed design and some more features. The most important feature to mention is a newly developed sense-and-avoid system which follows a different technology and design philosophy if you compare it to recent products from its competitors. Xiro claims that they use a radar system to detect obstacles. To us it looks like some kind of rotating laser scanner which is built on top of the main fuselage and is said to rotate by 50 rounds per second. Unfortunately we were not able to test fly the Xplorer 2. It remains open if the 360 degree scanner scans only on one layer or it would cover more layers in space to make the collision prevention system more „3D’ish“.
Selfie Drone and Semi-Pro Camera Drone complete Xiro’s portfolio
The next product announcement is 225mm sized foldable quadcopter which will be only controllable via a smartphone app. The small selfie companion was designed to be super easy in controls and very portable. This makes it a perfect quad for the outdoor community. It remains open if Xiro can overcome the challenges companies like Lily or Zano were already facing and have mostly failed to achieve. The last newly announced product is a semi-professional camera drone which has some design references to the DJI Inspire. Instead of the complex morphing mechanics of the Inspire the Xiro drone has a fixed arm setup but is likely to have a retractable camera. We can not wait to get hold of test samples of those very promising looking products!
