Everything should have bumpers.

You know how much we love quadcopters. We even started a drone forum even though we had to settle for the ridiculous domain name Drone.Horse. But we admit, it can be a major bummer for a new pilot to crash a quadcopter into smithereens on its first flight - even a super-cheap one like the Cheerson quadcopters we sold a couple of weeks back.

This little Odyssey Sky Runner Quadcopter takes a different approach to drone training: rather than just being so cheap you don’t care about breaking it, it’s designed to survive the crash. It’s surrounded at all times by an impact-absorbing, crash-mitigating barrel cage. This giant training wheel not only helps it roll down stairs, up walls, and across the floor, it also protects it from the inevitable bumps and jolts up the learning curve. You could still demolish it if you really tried, but you’ll do a lot less wincing every time it collides with something.

So why can’t everything be surrounded by a protective cage? Your car would just bounce off of oncoming traffic. Drop your phone and watch it bounce unharmed on the pavement. Knock over a wine glass with your elbow? You’ll still have to wipe up spilled wine, but you won’t have to dig through broken glass to do it. And football players could wear protective cages around their heads, so that when they collide, they’d be just fi-

Oh. Right. They do. Unfortunately, when it comes to squishy tech like the human body, there’s only so much impact a protective covering can absorb. The brain will still rock around inside the skull and get concussed. But hey, wait, maybe we could put a cage around the brain, inside the skull. We could end concussions forever and all it would take is highly intrusive brain surgery for every human being!

On second thought, maybe we’ll just see how it works out for the toy copter first.