DJI Air 3S First FULL ActiveTrack Flight – Small Crash With New Sensors

All right, so you guys know what time it is – a new drone means another ActiveTrack test flight video, today with the DJI Air 3S. This is going to be our first flight using ActiveTrack 360 with this drone. You might be wondering why I’m going to be doing a full ActiveTrack flight if I’ve already done one with the Air 3, and this is just a mid-cycle refresh, but we’ve actually got a good amount of differences with this drone as it pertains to autonomy, ActiveTrack, and all of the other automated modes that come within the DJI Air 3 series.

DJI Air 3S: New Feature and Interface

For one, we’ve got brand new sensors. We’ve also got new software, and we’re reviewing this and testing it out in a post-Neo era, where DJI has developed a drone that is entirely designed around tracking, so there is a good amount to discuss here.

The first thing I want to point out is that things are a little bit different when we want to start tracking. On the left side, we now have a different emblem – it’s the middle emblem that has like two lines and a circle in the middle. You’ll tap on that, and from here it automatically analyzes me as a subject. If I had a car or another person next to me, I could just simply tap on the person I want to follow, and now it’s got me in the frame and it’s going to be tracking me.

Initial Setup and First Crash

What I just noticed is you can actually push C1, and it’ll switch to ActiveTrack right away, which is pretty cool. Right now it looks like we are in Auto mode. We want to turn Auto off – I haven’t had the best luck with Auto tracking.

I’ve got it in the forward tracking mode right now, so it’s going to be in front of me. I kind of want to start with it on the backside, so I’m going to spin this around. It should fly to my left and around to the back side of me.

I guess the first thing that I want to discuss here is tracking from a drone’s perspective in a post-Neo world. DJI has developed a fully autonomous drone, being the Neo, that actually – that was a pretty good dodge there – that actually doesn’t even ship with a remote controller. You’re able to fly the Neo with just your phone, just your voice, with just the drone itself – you can just push a button and the drone will track and follow you, and that is like the future that I expect. Oh, the drone is flying over there for some reason. It looks like it wants to do right.

We have our first casualty literally not even a minute into the flight. I can kind of understand why the drone would crash into something like this with all the tiny little branches, but looking back at the screen recording in the bottom left corner, it looked like the drone wanted to fly all the way around me to get back to being behind me, even though it was already behind me. I really don’t understand why it was going in that direction, but here we are.

Second Attempt and Lighting Conditions

Take number two here – we should probably get the drone a little bit away from this tree that it crashed into. We’ll go ahead, enable Focus Track, and check that out. Notice there’s a car down there it actually picks up as a subject it could track, giving you the plus icon if I wanted to track that, but we’re going to track myself. We’ll press on C1 to use ActiveTrack and let’s give this another shot.

I kind of forget where we were – I think we were talking about the Neo. I do briefly just want to mention that the time that we are flying in this is a little bit later in the day where we have these longer shadows, and I was going to say that I’m very interested to see how the drone performs like flying directly into the sun. Right now you’ll notice by the camera that the drone is looking basically at the shadow side of the trees, so it’s going to give it a little bit more of a tough time to try and find those tree branches.

During the fall, we of course have trees that don’t have many leaves on them, so the tree branches are going to be potentially bad news for the A3S. What’s funny is I think with the Air 3 we had an early crash as well. I’ll tell you right now it’s probably going to have a really difficult time with these trees above me here, so hopefully the drone sees them and lowers its altitude. I don’t understand why the drone is flying so high.

Controller and Neo Comparison

In that post-Neo world, to me, when I have a tracking drone, holding the controller like this is kind of annoying. I’m going to address something right off the bat – I know that there’s going to be some people that have seen the little RC remote motion tracker or the beacon, so to speak, that’s been leaked. I don’t have it; I’ve got no information about when it’s going to come out, although I do think that’s kind of going to change the game for tracking with this drone.

I mean, if I just had a beacon that I could put in my pocket that simply gave me all of the ActiveTrack controls that I needed, it would be nice. I do like that I’m able to hold the controller and make changes on the fly like I can pitch my gimbal up and down, but really, when I’m riding my OneWheel it’s great I have access to my hands, but if I was on a bike, if I was skiing, if I was doing something where I didn’t have access to my hands, I really would hate having to hold the controller.

Navigation Performance

The drone actually did a pretty good job at sneaking through those trees. Of course, right off the bat, it really didn’t do all that great, but we’re still working out the kinks here. We have a fairly open area here – I’m going to go a little bit further down the road and go through a more heavily wooded area. It’s just kind of like this tight path that goes through the trees. It’s very short, but it’ll be cool to see how the drone reacts in that sense.

The drone just continues to want to fly up fairly high – every single time when it comes down below the trees, and I think that it should stay below the trees, it tries to pop back up. To its credit, it’s doing a good job at staying low. The Neo was great because it stayed so close to me, but the DJI Air 3S just feels like it’s so far away.

Testing Through Complex Terrain

Let’s see what it does here because it’s probably going to lose me as I come around the corner. Let’s see – picks me up a little bit, stops, is it going to go to the left? Yep, it comes to the left, picks me back up, which is pretty good. Now is it going to fly down the path? There it goes – oh, it’s going a little bit high. That was actually okay. I wish it would have stayed with me like perfectly, but the fact that it didn’t crash – I mean, that’s really all that I have to be happy about.

Let’s try riding straight towards it – this might be tough. Is it going to lose me? So now it’s flying straight ahead, it’ll choose that gap – was flying straight towards a tree. It’s using that gap to let me pass, which is nice. Now it should try and catch back up. That was pretty smooth.

Speed and Usage Scenarios

You know, every time that I bring a drone out here to do an ActiveTrack video, I almost feel like it’s an easier test in terms of what it’s able to handle. There’s going to be people riding dirt bikes that are much faster than what I’m on – my OneWheel is like a maximum speed of 12 or 13 miles per hour. But then there’s also people out there that are going to be riding faster things, but there might be people riding in tighter areas. I feel like this is like the perfect mixture of obstacles it needs to dodge and move around, and I also think that it’s a good mixture of speed.

Control Interface and Navigation Features

Look at the wheel in the bottom left corner – this is how we can give the drone commands as to where we want it to fly. In the case of when we started, it seemed like the drone was tracking from the front. I moved it to behind, and then we all know how that went and ended up crashing.

Sensor Technology

This has a similar set of obstacle avoidance sensors as the Air 3, the Mavic 3 Pro, and the Mini 4 Pro, but these sensors can actually see in low light better. The older sensors were rated for 15 lux of viewing distance at nighttime – that’s the old sensors on Mavic 3 Pro and Air 3. Now with this, we have one lux of viewing, so in my mind with the sensor’s ability to see better at nighttime, it should do much better at detecting the shadowy areas, giving it better dynamic range to really make decisions on its own.

Golf Course Testing

Now we also have the front-facing LIDAR sensor. It doesn’t seem like there’s anybody on the golf course, so we’re going to go for it. Let me go and push it out to the left a little bit further away. So now the drone is going to fly out to my left side, which is good – that actually made a nice solid move right away. When we were going from front to back it took a little bit, it lagged a little bit, but this is pretty good.

Coming up here, I’m going to have the drone track me from the right side because we’re going to be riding along the tree line. I’m going to push it around to the right side, and I want it to follow me from behind. Nice – starting to make its move. Hopefully it makes its move quicker as we go around the corner. There we are – it’s pretty good at understanding what it needs to do in terms of where it needs to fly.

Advanced Navigation Tests

This is always a testy area for the drone because there’s two trees up here on the right side. The Mavic 2 Pro way long ago, I remember just completely crashed into one of these trees. I almost lost it down here in the stream. I was too busy not crashing my OneWheel to hear or see what happened with the drone. I am way overexposed in the video. I don’t know what happened with the drone – I wasn’t looking, I’m going to have to go back and look, but the drone recovered. I heard it hit a branch and then I saw it go behind the tree.

High-Altitude Testing

Why don’t we keep the drone flying up above us, up above the trees? I’ll tell you what – I think that every single time that I do one of these videos tracking me on my OneWheel, my OneWheel just consistently gets worse and worse. I do have a low battery on this thing actually – it is giving me the yellow light here. We’ve been tracking for a pretty good amount of time, but we’ll go until this thing dies and tells me that I cannot ride anymore.

For the rest of the time, let’s just have the drone follow me from up above. Now the drone is pretty far away from any obstacles, but it’s going to have a hard time keeping track of me. Like here, I’m going to go underneath this branch – it’s going to lose me here. Ready? I’m going to pop out from the left side here in the far section of the frame. Let’s see if it picks – nope. All right, it’s just going to completely stop.

Final Flight Segments

Let’s fly back over. Check that out – even from all the way up here it can pick me up. Boom, C1 – oh it lost me, it lost me just as I was trying. All right, so I’m manually flying the drone over now. It’s not recognizing me. Let me come down a little bit more. Oh come on – there we are. Boom, ActiveTrack, now we’re going. Now we’re in business.

Let’s keep the drone way high, let’s put it high up – oh no, there’s the red light, the OneWheel is dying! All right, well look, I think that was a fairly good first flight using ActiveTrack. I think that as we continued down here we might run into the same issue with these trees up above.

Manual Control Takeover

You’ll notice that as I go and I ride under the trees, and one of the drone would have kept up with me as far as that last example right there goes, it probably would have lost me and maybe it would have continued with its pace, but look – you know what, it’s kind of trying to fly all by itself right now. I’m going to go ahead, because it’s in ActiveTrack, I am just going to press on stop and I’m going to take over control.

Final Thoughts

I think that overall, the drone did a pretty good job in ActiveTrack. I can’t think of a time where I’ve done one of these ActiveTrack flights and I haven’t had something go wrong – I’ve always had some sort of crash, I’ve always had some sort of time where the drone has lost me. There’s been not many times that I’ve had a perfect, flawless flight.

Future Updates

Stay tuned on the channel – we’re going to have a lot more about the DJI Air 3S coming out over the next couple of weeks, and I think that beacon is probably a definite. I mean, I’ve seen the leaks, it looks like it’s an official DJI product, so once that beacon comes out with whatever drone it’s going to be compatible with, I think that’s going to be a major game-changer in terms of ActiveTrack and automated flight.

Anyway, thank you guys so much for watching. As always, I’ll talk to you later. Peace!