The title is not meant to be alarmist. If it gets attention, that's enough.
The usage of "360° Obstacle Avoidance" is accurate in terms of a flat, horizontal plane. In 3D space, things get, well... it's complicated
Autel Evo 2 made a big splash with the OA Camera Array on it. They would alternately say it had "360° coverage", and "comes with 720° omnidirectional obstacle avoidance"
720° eh? I measured 717.3°.
Anyway, looking at the M3 Manual, I saw something in the sensor coverage diagrams that I thought interesting. A fairly large uncovered area.
Going back to the E2P for reference, a YouTube channel; Jack of all Trades did OA testing, discussing the 45° angle blind spots, but ALSO blind area above the front aircraft -because the sensor array is on the back. He nearly flies into a beam under the trestle - because he comes at it with the front, top of the AC. He shows this at 10:00 in the video:
There is a significant area that the Mavic 3 cannot cover with Obstacle Avoidance. It's not likely many would have a collision because of it, but in the interest of understanding what is covered, and what the limitations are, I did a crude white board, using DJI's diagrams from page 17 of the User Manual. I tried multiple screen recorders but after close to an hour screwing around, I just used Paint and show the issue.
Comments welcome. It's all for awareness. It's FYI, not criticism of DJI. The use of wide angle cameras mounted at 45° is brilliant in its simplicity. One of those things that are incredibly obvious... AFTER the fact. As in "why didn't anyone think of this before?"
But it's not perfect. There's a point of diminishing returns, and sticking more and more sensors to cover that last sliver of space isn't necessarily a good solution.
Here is my explanation.
The usage of "360° Obstacle Avoidance" is accurate in terms of a flat, horizontal plane. In 3D space, things get, well... it's complicated
Autel Evo 2 made a big splash with the OA Camera Array on it. They would alternately say it had "360° coverage", and "comes with 720° omnidirectional obstacle avoidance"
720° eh? I measured 717.3°.
Anyway, looking at the M3 Manual, I saw something in the sensor coverage diagrams that I thought interesting. A fairly large uncovered area.
Going back to the E2P for reference, a YouTube channel; Jack of all Trades did OA testing, discussing the 45° angle blind spots, but ALSO blind area above the front aircraft -because the sensor array is on the back. He nearly flies into a beam under the trestle - because he comes at it with the front, top of the AC. He shows this at 10:00 in the video:
There is a significant area that the Mavic 3 cannot cover with Obstacle Avoidance. It's not likely many would have a collision because of it, but in the interest of understanding what is covered, and what the limitations are, I did a crude white board, using DJI's diagrams from page 17 of the User Manual. I tried multiple screen recorders but after close to an hour screwing around, I just used Paint and show the issue.
Comments welcome. It's all for awareness. It's FYI, not criticism of DJI. The use of wide angle cameras mounted at 45° is brilliant in its simplicity. One of those things that are incredibly obvious... AFTER the fact. As in "why didn't anyone think of this before?"
But it's not perfect. There's a point of diminishing returns, and sticking more and more sensors to cover that last sliver of space isn't necessarily a good solution.
Here is my explanation.
