China's DJI Technology has roughly 70% of the $2 billion consumer drone market, having sold around 700,000 of its ubiquitous white quad-rotor drones last year. And if a demo Tuesday in New York City is any indication, the company is about to sell quite a few more.
The unveiling of DJI's latest consumer drone, the Phantom 4, shows a company comfortable with its hold on the drone market and unconcerned with increasing industry talk of commoditization within the market. Building on the big sales of previous DJI drones, the Phantom 4 includes a range of new onboard sensors and computing capabilities that make it easy to pilot and very difficult to crash. At $1,399, it’s a high-priced product in a category where sub-$500 consumer drones are now commonplace.
DJI is betting that the Phantom 4 will elevate it above those low-cost newcomers piling into the consumer drone market while making it more difficult for legacy competitors like Berkeley-based 3D Robotics to differentiate themselves.
In doing so, DJI designed the Phantom 4 to compensate for human errors and basically fly itself, all the while delivering smooth aerial video and photography. It's less a remote-controlled aircraft and more like an expensive but effective photography accessory for the iPad. For most consumers, that's exactly what it should be.
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The Phantom 4 boasts plenty of little design tweaks that set it apart from its predecessors. It is made from new materials to decrease weight and increase rigidity, and it has a repositioned camera gimbal to improve balance, a new battery that provides longer flight times (up to 28 minutes) per charge, and some internal hardware and software adjustments that should improve flight control and stability.
But the primary innovation is embodied by two small optical sensors embedded in the front of the aircraft that let the Phantom "see" what's in front of it. These, along with the drone’s primary camera, motion sensors, and a downward-facing optical sensor on the belly of the aircraft, allow the drone’s computer vision software to create a volumetric map of its environment.
That's a technical way of saying the drone can see what's around it and, more importantly, avoid colliding with objects while in flight. This is no small feat, as so-called "sense-and-avoid" technologies have long been something of a holy grail within the consumer drone industry and something engineers can technically do, but have had trouble making reliable and affordable.