Hands-On with DJI’s Inspire 1 Quadcopter!
hey guys I'm welcome testing I'm here to
have a shop with Eric Chang it's been here before here hello you're here for
DJI today and you're showing us the new inspire one which is the new quad that
you guys announced a couple days ago on Treasure Island that's right yeah let's
just run down speeds and feeds to start because there's a lot of stuff that's
happened this is a higher-end quad than the Panavision – is you know more
professional use right that's the goal yeah this is a higher-end quad it's sort
of all of the technologies we've developed either a standalone products
or as part of older products rolled into a flagship so this is a design for
higher-end you see their high-end hobby use or professional use in some cases
there's a ton of stuff that happens here the first thing and we're not going to
show it now is we're inside we could but it's a transformer yeah when you take
off with it these they're sort of like wings and they come up into a v-shape
and that drops the body and the camera below and in the landing structure for
full unobstructed view kind of like a Klingon bird-of-prey right so the wings
come up and then the camera game has a full 360-degree turn on the gimbal so
you can see everything all around you right that's right so the camera can
turn 360 degrees it also drops the center of gravity below the props it's a
little bit more stable that way oh that I didn't realize that and and it's
because it's bigger it's a bigger quad in general bigger propeller is more
weight but it's close to three kilograms yeah just under three kilograms so
that's just just over twice the weight of a Phantom series the processor 13
inches as opposed to nine and the whole the propulsion system is a lot more
powerful so our battery is a six cell battery
it's running 22 volts so that's twice the voltage of the old phantom so
there's a ton of lift in this thing then that means you're gonna be able to go
faster and go higher and yeah absolutely so it's it's it's overpowered for most
situations which means that it can very easily tackle their complex environments
you know like strong wind or gusts or flying over volcano maybe two volcanoes
okay um what else has changed to the camera it's a new camera
new gimble's can you tell me a little about the camera yeah the camera it's 4k
camera it's still a fairly small sensor one over 2.3 inch sensor and it's
mounted on a 3 axis gimbal here as you can see it's totally stable
so we shoot at 4k 35 second or 24 and 25 or 1080p at 60
it's also a 12 megapixel stills camera it shoots an Adobe DNG RAW our
photographers always want that it's a 94 degree rectilinear wide-angle lens so
what's is what is regularly range so if you look at a lot of the footage that
comes from either the division or our platforms that are flying other cameras
like Oprah's you'll see a lot of distortion so as soon as the camera
tilts down the world kind of becomes curved and quite aggressively so there's
a ton of distortion most of us who do a lot of video remove that distortion in
post which is time consuming and not ideal so this will have more or less
straight horizons and it's a more natural look so this would be sort of
something more suitable for Sandra's ography um you guys changed some stuff
to make it a little bit easier to fly takeoff and landing and then also give
you better control at low altitudes kind of where GPS doesn't have fine enough to
jail right or when you don't have any GPS signal so for example inside here or
under forest canopy and something like that you would typically lose GPS and
what would happen in something like the Phantom is that when you lose GPS
they're still stable but they might drift around so then no longer has
position hold and so what we have an inspire one is this stabilization
package on the bottom you can see there are three sensors here this is an
optical flow based stabilization it's actually a combination of optical flow
and ultrasonic or sonar so we we can measure the distance to the ground
without relying on a GPS signal or barometer and we can also measure the
rate of change so you know as the ground as the aircraft moves around the ground
is moving and this sensor tells us in what direction and how fast so when you
have when when the when the drone comes in lands automatically whether it's lost
signal or the batteries in your controller died or whatever it's not
going to do the thing where it slams down really hard because it thought it
was three feet higher than it was or or whatever yeah we used to do I mean all
these used to land basically by by descending slowly until they stopped
descending so they're not aware of what's below them but we know exactly
how far away the ground is and we know what direction the grounds moving so one
thing that's really great with this and we can we can demo it later if we fly
but you can hover it right above the ground and
anyone who flies these things knows that you basically can never hover it right
above the ground because of ground effects you're gonna you're going to
crash yeah yeah it's gonna it's going to shift around a lot even if the GPS
trying to keep it in the same place you'll see it sort of move around so
with this new sensor you it's totally rock-solid in position holes so one of
the things when you were giving us the demo over on Treasure Island before
event a little bit and you were flying with one of the landing skids on the
dance floor just kind of skating in figure eight and that's something I mean
I'm sure somebody could do that with it with the Phantom two but I I couldn't
and I would have crashed immediately had I tried something like that so I thought
I was really cool um the optical sensor kind of makes it like the world's it
works similar to an to an optical mouse right yes that's right that same kind of
deep same time deal okay what's the the flight time with the with the battery
that you haven't it's 18 minutes okay so it's a little bit less than the Phantom
series and that seems to be sort of the the sweet spot right now for for larger
quads like this I mean I'm sure if you're talking people who are doing like
establishing aerial shots and stuff like that they don't need to hour linger time
for that they need a good five minutes and then enough times it to a couple
times right yeah most people who have a goal in mind when flying tend to find 10
to 15 minutes to be enough for a specific shot um battery is removable
the battery is movable it just pulls straight up out of the body and then in
charge time for the battery it's a bigger battery so it'll take a little
longer right it'll take longer but our charger is more powerful so it's running
just over an hour if you deplete the battery completely and and you guys have
the logic the charging logic is in the battery not in the charger still right
and not only charging logic but monitoring logic so now on from the app
you can look at the the quality the status of each cell and that the health
of each cell so that you get more information about the battery it also
counts charge cycles now so you can you can automatically sort of or you can
swap batteries out after they've been used a certain number of times and it
counts charge cycles in the battery not on the app that's right in the belly oh
that's great so no surprises with batteries which is seem surprising yeah
um can we talk about the controller because a lot like it seems like a lot
of work has been done here yes the controller has been completely
redesigned now this is a prototype controller the new one doesn't quite
look like it's similar but the new ones it's white and this iPad holder is
totally different okay so the controller is great because it
incorporates a lot of physical physical controls buttons and dials for camera
control which you used to have to do with your fingers or with tilt on the
app in a lot of cases right tilting the app or or if you wanted to hack in your
own potentiometer which is something that that I did with early phantoms you
could have a dial on the back okay but there was some do-it-yourself required
and we eventually shipped a lever that controls the gimbal but that's the only
control we give you so you sort of start shooting video you keep shooting or you
have to basically you have to take your hands off the radio to access the camera
which is a bad thing or not desire it always yeah it can't be a bad thing I
mean if you're shooting stills it's not such a big deal but if you're if you're
shooting a video and you need to do a complex camera control like you're
tilting while you're moving up and spiraling around a tower um it's really
hard to do that before especially with one person especially the one person
yeah so we have a start and stop video we have a stills like I take a picture
button we have a playback button and then we have two dials one of which
pitches the camera up and down and the other lets you cycle through and change
camera settings so exposure control ISO and shutter speed like your control
setting on a DSLR or mirrorless camera something like that yeah that's right
like a toggle may toggles and changes are these programmable can we change
them to whatever we want to use or they lock at that for right now the camera
controls I believe are locked at that now this could change because we have
quite a bit of remote control customisation that's possible just
through the iPad app so those of you who have been in RC for a while know that
normally there's they're very complex menus or get to plug it into a some kind
of application on computer but in this case you can just configure it all here
so you can map channels switch modes these are sort of advanced settings that
most people would never need to touch but if you do need to that's there for
you one of the other things that I noticed you did is you pulled the range
extender and a lot of the external stuff that maybe wasn't even in the phantom
and it's all built into the remote now for the controller yeah so one of the
fundamental things we did is we integrated light bridge light bridge is
a high definition wireless transmission system it's something that we sell as a
standalone product for fourteen hundred dollars so you can you can transmit
either 720p or 1080p great distances and also get metadata
and can aircraft control we have 16 radio control channels on it and also an
analog video signal so it's just basically a data transport so we have
now made that the primary way that the radio is control talk to there so it's
no longer a boosted up Wi-Fi signal you know it's it's light bridge now it's
like very dry it's no longer on Wi-Fi so you can see we're connected not through
Wi-Fi anymore but through a USB cable through the
lightning lightning port and so what that means is on our on our controller
here we have USB and we also have a we have HDMI out so not only can you
connect an iPad or an iPhone or an Android device but any HD monitor that
has an HDMI input that sounds great and and one of the things I was excited
about is you know previously you had to choose between a video signal out that
had telemetry or a clean video signal diecutting use for footage or capture or
whatever you can control that on each and output now sort of so you on from a
single radio you can only output video to one device so HDMI or USB okay if you
have both attached you get a clean video signal on HDMI and you have all the all
the metadata and control on the put notation on the i/o no video but what we
do have is dual operator support now so with a second identical remote control
you can have an operator just dealing with the camera so triggering it I'm
trolling the gimbal in more than one direction not just pitch but also yaw
the full 36 the full 360 so you can have a pilot just worrying about the position
in the camera and then the camera operator is controlling the camera and
from there you can have you can use either one of the ports for output so
what we did at the event that the launch event was we had a second a slave unit
at the at the mixing board and we just have the HDMI output going to the board
and then the pilot was roaming around flying okay so that's how we were
getting the live HD live 1080p video off of the quad what was blowing around
above us that's exactly right and very cool and it didn't you know they were
stock units we didn't do anything to them and so you know I've been hacking
these kind of HD wireless solutions for the last few months because I've been
doing live streaming from Burning Man and the volcano thing we wanted to
record HD locally just in case we lost the aircraft right so these were all
sort of built using D products kind of glued together and they
all work but it didn't take a lot of testing to make that work and
configuration whereas now it's just it's just this is off the shell right on the
off-the-shelf um the other thing you guys announced at that event was first
kind of SDK and api's to let people access you know write software that
takes advantage of the hardware that you guys build yes and this is super
exciting for us because we are reached out to by industry you know virtually
every I would say every minute you know we get an email from somebody who has an
idea about how a camera in space could be interesting for them so some of the
industries are really obvious like farming construction search-and-rescue
right things like that are really real estate real estate requires no
modification to the equipment to work right now and but we haven't written any
specific apps for those industries and so what we're doing now is allowing
people in those industries or service providers to write their own
applications to control the Phantom series so this would be phantom 2 vision
and phantom 2 Vision+ ok are the aircraft that have Wi-Fi signals coming
to mobile devices so you can write a mobile app for Android or iOS and
control the the aircraft you can control the phantom control it's camera and and
basically tell to do whatever you love the mazing sweet so it me that that
should open a lot of possibilities for yeah like you said search-and-rescue is
an obvious choice where people in setup on autonomous search grids send the
quads out bring them back in for battery changes and send more out with right
thermal-imaging cameras or whatever which areas have been done and right how
long ago and um also disaster disaster recovery one of the things the pics 4d
folks have done meta 3d maps of places where there been mudslides and stuff
like that I know and and that seems like it's a incredibly valuable tool there's
a couple of different levels to the SD to the to the developer agreement right
yes so there's there's different kind of levels of access that people can get can
you can you talk a little bit about that and how that works for people who want
to build apps for the pods so pretty much anyone can download what we're
calling level 1 it's a very creative name I know but level 1 SDK which is
basically read-only access except for camera so you cannot control where your
phantom goes so you flight you still fly it around
manual but you can control the camera so you
can tell the camera when to take pictures you know one of these one of
the things that people that immediately was say distance trigger so take a
picture every 10 meters you know this is very standard for survey we didn't
support it but now someone else can support it and then they can take all
those pictures and upload them to the cloud for example their automated
reconstruction so that's level one and you have access to control the camera
but you can also read what's not been written to the memory card so in the US
there's USB mode and you can just pull images and video and you also get read
access to like GPS coordinates and accelerometer and gyroscope and that
kind of stuff yeah it's a full telemetry access including live stream of video so
lower lower quality animal analog video you get so that's level 1 level 2 access
requires an application so this is now and you're entering a partnership with
DJI and these are these are still these are currently negotiated under one to
one basis so we don't have kind of standards drive a standard partnerships
agreement because if you're an independent developer who wants to write
something that's in the conservation space or something it's probably going
to be pretty easy to work with DJ on that but if you're you know a multi
global multinational organization with a very specific business goal and you're
charging a lot we're going to have a different agreement ok so that's that's
how it works now in that you have full control over the phantom using using
level 2 SDK meaning you can you can tell it where to fly you can upload and
download waypoints you can automatically take off and land so full control
basically the the vision the current vision app that you have on the iPhone
or SD or the Android devices can be written with SDK level 2 okay so yeah so
your when you say everything you really mean everything you're kind of achieving
parity with a lot of the open-source flight controllers once people reach the
level they're going to get it get enter in a write developer agreement with you
well I would say we're reaching parity and non research situations you know so
if your goal is to replace the positioning system you're not gonna be
able to do that with ours because you can't get in that inner loop in the code
okay so you know we're sort of we're opening up the useful parts for the vast
majority of people doing research or using these for commercial purposes most
researchers tend to want lower level access so something that's open source
is probably more appropriate okay I'm super stoked to go out and
fly the new quad I think the API stuff is going to be really important in the
long term and we can't even imagine what people are going to use it for right now
but can we take it out for a test plane yeah let's do it
okay great thank Sarah for bringing out the inspire to show us you know how it
flies and give us the rundown I can't we put my hands on one of these yeah oh
gosh – later well we'll be back with more untested
soon so you guys later see you bye yeah the zoom back that
ready no that's the wrong way oh you want what which way do you want
it I don't I don't want to go back I don't want to do kappa hit Joey okay we
want to package a plea yeah we'll go up and are you able to control the gimbal
whoa that's amazing no way my quad that's great that's amazing
