DJI’s New Phantom 4: The world of drones will never be the same
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Meet DJI’s new drone: the Phantom 4.
It’s the first consumer unit that can see the world around it and adjust accordingly, the next big step towards a truly autonomous aircraft. The Phantom 4 will hit the breaks if you try to fly it into a wall, if for some reason you tried to. If you ask it to fly from your position to a spot across a river, and there is a bridge in between, it will make a judgement call: increase speed to clear the obstacle or, if that isn’t possible, stop and hover in place, awaiting your next command.
According to The Verge, the Phantom 4 does so with the help of five cameras: two on the front and two on the bottom, plus the main 4K camera that has always been onboard to capture video.The images captured by these cameras are run through computer vision software which constructs a 3D model of the world around it that the drone can intelligently navigate.
But it does more than that: A new feature called TapFly eliminates the need to learn the two-stick controller. Push one button to take off, set a maximum distance the drone can travel, and just tap on the live video feed that appears on your screen.
New sensors also make the Phantom 4 more stable when hovering.
But wait, there’s more: The ActiveTrack feature. You can trace a circle around a subject you want to keep it in frame: a runner, race car, or mountain bike. The Phantom’s onboard computer builds a 3D model of that subject and then automatically tracks to keep it in frame. The pilot can use the remote to make fine-grained adjustments to the focus, framing or camera settings, or they can just sit back and let the drone do all the work.
Now, although the new drone costs $1,399, with the new autonomous features you are way less likely to wreck your aircraft, and you don’t need to spend any time mastering manual piloting to capture great aerial footage.
In conclusion, though not the cheapest, DJI’s new Phantom 4 is surely the most cutting edge today.
