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A New Human-Seeking Drone, Much Cheaper Than a Predator
An anonymous reader writes with this envy-inspiring bit from Gizmodo on the Aeryon Scout Quadrotor: "The drone, packing a camera that can ID a human from almost two miles away (using a standard digital cam or thermal vision), can be hand-assembled. Once in the sky, it gyro-orients itself to track whatever it is you're tracking, can hit speeds of over 30 MPH, and is all controllable with a touch remote. Tap a target, and watch the drone zoom over. It's not going to rain down any Hellfire missiles, but hey, it only weighs a kilogram."
depending on size - having not gotten to TFA yet
Here's a better article on it with some pictures that show scale (in case you're not on board with the video craze): http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/military-robots/aeryon-scout-quadrotor-spies-on-bad-guys-from-above
It can easily fit in a small suitcase, so no, you're not going to be mounting firearms on it.
The government can't save you.
I'll be honest - I didn't read the entire summary, either.
Hand assembled wasn't the only misstatement in the article. It can't "ID" a person from 2 "miles" away. The narrator clearly says "with its 425mm equivalent zoom lens it can detect a human from over 2 kilometers away." Of course, we can blame jizmodo for these screwups, as it's their article which is quoted in TFS.
John
That's probably referring to something else (like radio communication range), as the top speed is given as 50 km/h (which would give it a battery life of about 3 minutes if it only had enough juice for 3 km/h).
Article I saw gave it a battery life of 25 mins.