Drone Beat: Oculus-Piloted Quadrocopters, Iran's Copycat Drone and More

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U.S. Customs Border Patrol Air and Marine Division Deputy Director Supervisory AIA Pete McNall checks the camera on the Predator drone unmanned aerial vehicle at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., on Oct. 25, 2007.

Image: Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai2014-05-12 17:56:11 UTC

The U.S. government uses them to bomb alleged terrorists in far-away places. Tech companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook are all toying with the idea of using them, and now they're a photographer's secret weapon. Drones are a big part of our lives, whether we see them or not. Drone Beat collects the best and most important stories every week.

Last update: Monday, May 12, 12:27 p.m. ET

Drone Beat's coverage areas this week

Rand Paul asks Obama to release the drone memo

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is not giving up. The libertarian senator reiterates that he wants the Obama administration to release the infamous drone memo that authorized the killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011.

In a New York Times op-ed published on Monday, Paul explains why he's opposing the nomination of David Barron, the author of the memo, as judge of the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston — just over a year after Paul famously challenged the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director with a 13-hour filibuster.

Paul wrote that killing an American without due process — such as with a drone strike — "is an extraordinary concept and deserves serious debate. Moreover, it might be unconstitutional, since the decision was taken without the intervention of a judge, and without giving Awlaki the chance to defend himself, Paul argued.

"Citizens not in a battlefield, however despicable, are guaranteed a trial by our Constitution," he wrote.

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See also: Parrot Introduces Oculus Rift-Enabled Drone

U.S. drone strike kills 6 alleged al-Qaida Militants

A drone strike in Yemen killed six alleged al-Qaida militants on Monday, according to a report by the Associated Press. The American drone fired on a car in the Marib province, in the Husoun al-Jalal area in Abieda Valley, according to anonymous officials. The strike is just the latest in a series of drone attacks in Yemen, which the U.S. has long considered a hot bed of al-Qaida terrorists.

Iran: We have copied the American spy drone

Iran's Revolutionary Guard showed off a copy of an American spy drone before the country's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Sunday in Tehran. Khamenei visited an exhibition organized by the Revolutionary Guard, which boasted that it had been able to reverse-engineer not only the drone's external structure, but also its internal systems. While it's impossible to know whether the drone the Iranian Revolutionary Guard showed off is actually functional, blogger and aviation expert David Cenciotti told Mashable that their claims could be true.

"They surely have copied it externally. Now, copying the internal systems is a whole another story. Although I don't feel like I can exclude that a priori," he said.

Parrot unveils new drone

Parrot, the company that makes one of the most famous — and cheap — consumer flying robots in the market (the AR.Drone 2.0) unveiled its new, most-advanced UAV to date: The Bebop. The new drone is piloted with a nifty Skycontroller unit that can even be connected to Oculus Rift, for a more immersive and futuristic experience.

The camera on Parrot's new drone can be controlled with an Oculus Rift headset.

Image: Mashable, Karissa Bell

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