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Parrot's new drone keeps its 'head' on straight

Drones are a seemingly everywhere at CES, but senseFly's sensor-laden eXom commercial quadcopter really caught our eye. Why's that? Well, for starters it has a self-leveling and stabilizing err... head up front. That cabeza packs one of five ultrasonic sensors, an ability to record "ultra high-res" stills, HD video and thermal data -- even simultaneously. Like the gizmo's final battery life, weight and price, however, the folks at senseFly, a division of Parrot, aren't ready to talk about exact resolution for any of the cameras. We'd imagine that since the drone's intended to look at pipelines and hydroelectric dams for cracks and defects at close proximity and with "sub-millimeter" accuracy, the imaging tools are going to be pretty powerful.

The ultimate goal, we're told, is to give civil engineers all the tools needed to have full situational awareness for inspecting places that'd otherwise be hard (or impossible) for humans to reach. Curious what it looks like in flight? That's what the video below is for.

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