DJI Air 3S Next-Gen Smart “Return To Home”

What’s up everybody? Shawn here from Air Photography. Today, I want to do a quick demonstration of the new Advanced Return to Home feature of the DJI Air 3S. It’s one of the new features that was introduced, and it’s actually pretty impressive. I did a demonstration of that in my full review, but I want to push it a bit further to really showcase what it is capable of now when doing a return to home.

READ MORE: DJI Air 3S Review – Overview of New Features and First Impressions

Advanced Mapping Technology

The Air 3S performs a scan during every flight, building a real-time map of the environment as it’s flying. This way, in the event of a failsafe return to home or if you’ve manually initiated a return to home, it has a good understanding of the environment. On top of that, it can now do it all without satellites. If you’ve lost connection to satellites, it’s no problem—it’ll still come back to you safely.

Demonstration Setup

I’m going to demonstrate this under a tree canopy. There are trees all around me, with a little bit of an opening that I’m going to fly through. In the past, if you took off from under a tree canopy (which I quite often do in the summer when it’s really hot and I like to stand in the shade), you’d fly out to an opening and then take off. The problem was that during return to home, it only went by GPS point, so it would come back above the tree canopy where it took off from and try to land. Obviously, it couldn’t do that—it would either detect the tree there or just run into it.

New Intelligent Return Feature

Now, the drone will know that we took off from under a tree canopy because it’s built that map, and it’s going to come back in a safe way. I’m going to demonstrate that for you here, and it’s actually pretty impressive how it works.

Flight Demonstration

As you can see, we’ve got the drone down there. I’m going to be recording on my Action 5 Pro as well so we can get some different angles. I’ve also got a screen recording going.

Let’s go ahead and put the drone up. The home point is updated. You can see there are trees all above where I took off from. We’re going to fly out to an open area and take off.

Now we’re going to put it up and go for a flight. We’ll just go out a couple hundred meters, and then we’ll initiate a return to home. We’ve gone about 325 meters, so now I’m going to initiate a return to home.

Observing the Return

I’m going to stand back from the pad so it doesn’t pick me up as an obstacle. You can see it’s put the virtual line on the screen—that’s the path it’s going to be taking. Most drones would come back with no issue; DJI drones are very reliable when it comes to return to home. The problem would be that it would come right above us, above the tree canopy where the home point is set, and then it wouldn’t be able to land because of the trees. Worst case, it would hit a tree if there were very thin branches.

Impressive Navigation

You can see there it’s picked up that the trees are there and it’s made that kind of S-shape around them. As mentioned, no other drone can do this. It’s going to find its way through there.

You can see it’s right above the pad or a little bit off, and now it’s landing. And there we go! That is actually pretty incredible. As you can see again, there are trees all above us. It’s kind of like a little bit of a tree tunnel that we have going on here, and it was able to come back and land pretty much right on the pad where it took off from.

Conclusion

That’s actually really impressive. There’s no other DJI drone currently that can do that—that can do a return to home and kind of make its way through terrain like this with a lot of trees. Like I said, it would just come right above the home spot and then try to land, but the Air 3S can find a safe route even when you’re in a very complex environment like this.

It’s actually really impressive, and it’s going to make flying drones like this even safer in case of a failsafe and it has to do a return to home. You don’t have to have satellites, and it will be able to traverse through situations like this where there are a lot of obstacles.

Thanks a lot for watching, and we’ll see you in the next one.