Selfie stick is a passe, here comes a 'selfie drone'

Melbourne: Annoyed by long selfie sticks in public? An Australian technology company has a solution -- a "selfie drone". This lets you click selfie without stretching the hand and gives you a perfect photo too.

Built by Australian technology company IoT Group, the "ROAM-e" drone opened for pre-sale on Thursday and will begin shipping internationally in June, Mashable website reported.

According to Ian Duffell, executive director of the IoT Group, the company's vision was to build "a selfie stick on steroids".

"The selfie stick's problem is it's confined by the length of the stick. The thought was, let's get the thing taking the picture flying with you," he was quoted as saying. 

After being tethered to a smartphone, the two rotor "ROAM-e" can be programmed using facial recognition technology to follow the user at a distance of up to 25 metres. 

The device can take 360-degree panoramas and can even stream a live video for up to 20 minutes of flight time. 

The $267 device has a 5-megapixel CMOS sensor camera and runs on Quadcore ARM Cortex A7 processor. Its rotors can be folded. 

"We wanted it to be small enough to fit into a bag or pocket. We modelled it on not being bigger than a 600-millilitre water bottle," Duffell explained.

"We all know drones fly around and take pictures, but because we've tailored it to be portable and in your space, it fits into a different category," he said.

IoT Group said they will an extra capability that is the ability of the drone to drop a pin on a map application, instructing the ROAM-e to travel to that point and return.