The Gladius Submersible Underwater Drone is another underwater drone that is using crowdfunding to get things moving and has tripled its goal of $30,000 raising over $91,000 with 22 days left on the campaign.
While this isn’t the first underwater drone looking to hit the consumer market, this one is one of the better looking and intriguing ones. Like the OpenROV Trident we covered two years ago that has raised nearly $1 million and the Fathom One more recently that raised over $200,000, the Gladius Submersible is showing that crowdfunders have a soft spot for the aqua drone.
The sleek shape features a camera capable of Ultra HD 1080P/4K quality photo and video — which may set it apart from the others for now. It still has the typical dive limits we’ve seen of up to 100 meters (328ft) deep and they have a horizontal range of 500 meters.
There is plenty of juice in the drone to allow you to stay submerged up to 3 hours on a single charge. Plus, you can capture directly to internal storage on the drone or live stream your dive in real-time.
The remote control is pretty slick too. Splitting apart and wrapping on each side of your Android or iPhone, it turns your phone into a video dive dashboard.
If you want to donate and actually get a Gladius, then act now for big savings. The minimum entry point is $599 that gets you drone in time for summer fun that includes a smartphone remote, 1080P HD Camera + 16G SD Card, a thrre-hour battery, and a 30 meter tether with wireless buoy. Another $200 gets you a 4K UHD camera and a wireless buoy with more range to shoot the footage over WiFi up to 500 meters. For $1,025 you can get the 4K camera, a larger memory card, a hard case and a 100 meter tether.
Most all of the submersible drones look pretty cool and this one has not only hit that mark, but just could have upped the ante a bit for the competition.
We’ll be sure to track this one over the next few months.
[via Indigogo]
