HoverAir X1 Pro vs The Gauntlet!! (Autonomous Tracking Test)

This is the HoverAir X1 Pro, and this is the gauntlet. The very first stage of this test is the tree tunnel here. It’s the one that kills the most drones, but it’s not the most dangerous stage of the route. From there, I transition to something a bit more open, yet almost every single drone somehow messes it up in some capacity. After that, we get into the high-speed stage. We’ll go full speed on this to see how well it tracks at higher speeds. Then, if it survives all of that without plunking into a tree, into the deep dark woods we go to see how well it can handle the ever-increasing tightness of the forest until it finally crashes. That’s how every one of these drone tests ends, and we’ll see if this thing can avoid that same fate.

Tracking Modes of the HoverAir X1 Pro

There are essentially three core ways the HoverAir X1 Pro can track you. The first is to simply use the drone by itself—no additional things, just a drone. Tap, and it follows you. Simple, right? That’s the way we’re going to use it.

You can also use your phone to control additional settings and get a bit of a preview, or you can use the beacon to effectively do the same thing. I’ll cover all those in my full review, but for the gauntlet, we’re just going with the clean, simple version of just the drone itself. For the mode I’m using, I’m opting for the new cycling mode in narrow. There are two options: narrow means it’s going to follow the exact path and not take any shortcuts, versus open, which might smooth things a bit more and take shortcuts. We don’t want that—we don’t want to hit a tree. Off we go!

Tree Tunnel Stage

As you can see from a height standpoint, it’s not that high right now—it’s just a couple of meters above me. Everything in the tree tunnel should be good so far. Still, this is where I kill a lot of drones, especially bigger ones. Smaller drones tend to do a better job of this for whatever reason. I think it’s because smaller drones just know not to do stupid things, whereas bigger drones often go off and do dumb stuff like going up into the trees, swinging out to the left and right, and all the things that kill drones. Right now, my speed is about 28 km/h, so roughly 15–20 mph or something like that. So far, so good. We’re going to make a turn up here to the left in just a moment. We’ll bring the speed up a little bit—we’re about 30 km/h now, so 20 mph. It’s definitely a little higher than I would have preferred, but so far, so good. It’s only got another 100 meters before we turn off and make it into the next stage—the transitionary stage—a stage that has downed a lot of drones for no good reason whatsoever.

Transitionary Stage Challenges

Let’s see how we do. Sometimes with people over here, we may have to reset things a little bit. Yep, we’re going to make an adjustment to the stage. What I’m going to do here is wait for the people to move out of the way. Hey, future me from the tree section right here—if you’re finding this video interesting or useful, just watch it all the way through. That’s the only thing the YouTube gods care about these days, and it would mean quite a bit to me and the channel (which is, I guess, just me). Thanks for watching! Here we go—off we go, and then to the right into the transitionary phase. This transition also takes down a lot of drones for some reason. They’ll hit one of those two signs right there, and my tire is feeling a little flat all of a sudden. Okay, so we’re going to have to go off-roading up here to get around this dog walker. We’ll go over here—easy peasy stuff—but the DJI Flip managed to hit that tree over there just an hour ago. Something that shouldn’t be all that difficult to follow here, but sometimes drones do weird things. I’ll get myself back on the path up here, and we’ll transition into the high-speed section.

High-Speed Section

Here we go in three, two, one—yeah, we’re off! Okay, we’re going to slowly bring it up to about 40 km/h or so. Right now, we’re at 30 km/h, so 20 mph, going through 33, 35, 38, and we’ll bring it up to 40 now—41, 42. It starts slowing down because we’ve got people up here, and I know from past testing that 44 km/h is the limit on this road. Back on the course here, you can see it’s following me with no problems at all. That said, I’m going to fast-forward through all this because, honestly, it’s a little bit boring and repetitive. Instead, we’re going to jump ahead to some of the more exciting and complicated stuff.

System Errors and Dolly Tracking Mode

“Bottom camera communication failure, please restart the device. System error, please restart your device.” This is one of the problems with the HoverAir—it always has a lot of excuses, errors, and random things that happen for no obvious reason. So, we’ll try again. Okay, next step—we’re going to put it in Dolly tracking mode. Dolly tracking means it should stay in front of us and film from ahead before it might eventually fall behind. We’ll see how well it works out here. There’s a little bit of a breeze, but it’s really not too much, to be honest. I’m going to start off a little slow here because speed is definitely a factor in Dolly track mode. But watch what happens as I get going a little faster. It’s doing really good right—whoa! Dude, what are you doing, little buddy? Trying to kill me? It’s doing really good right now—up until the very moment I say that. Every time I give these drones a compliment, they go off the rails. Okay, you can see it’s on this little flip—it’s going to follow me now. So at this point, it’s basically just tracking from behind. For fun, if I slow back down again, let’s see what happens. We’ll transition back to Dolly track—slow down a bunch. Let’s see—will it make that transition? No, it will not.

Deep Dark Woods Challenge

Up here is the start of the deep dark woods. I’m going to put it into follow-flat-mid mode, and let’s give this a roll. There we go—it’s in mid. I put it on flat for the altitude, so it should stay basically below my head, which means it should be safe. If I can cycle through it, it can follow through it into the woods. Now, this little branch here could be a problem right there. We’ll see how it handles that—it doesn’t even blink, it just goes straight through. By the way, at this point, the DJI Flip had crashed three times in the last 40 meters. So yeah, we’re going to go this way. We’re going to start yolo-ing through here, and it’s going to get incrementally more difficult as I keep riding—both for me, maybe the mud, but also the route itself. We may make it even more challenging if we need to. If this thing doesn’t easily crash into something, we’ll just add more and more complexity to it.

Increasing Complexity

So, we’ll go over here—a little soft in there. This is too easy—we’re going to go somewhere else. Hang tight! Let’s see if we can do it right. It’s done it running, so let’s see if it can do it while cycling. We’ll go slow at first—don’t worry. This is hilarious—this is a true test of how well it can follow directions on my precise path using that narrow mode, and this is definitely impressive. There we go—good job! Now we’ve got the next section across the street here. We’re going to pick up speed a little bit, just for fun. I appreciate that they put down some new bark on this—it makes it a little easier to go faster right now, no mud. Here comes a sharp turn—will it cut the corner and find death? This tree right here could be tricky—oh, easy peasy, mac and cheesy! It’s got this.

Pushing the Limits On The HoverAir X1 Pro

We’re going to go backwards a lot faster though—because why not? Easy again, demonstrating this thing is absolutely the king when it comes to tracking. Even the Skydio couldn’t pull off that kind of stuff—it would’ve been caught up by its minimum thresholds on either side. But now we’re going to pick up the pace a little bit, and this is where following directions is even more critical so it doesn’t try to shortcut anything. This probably doesn’t look super fast, but it’s trying to get its best shot—me too! There we go, back across into the arguably tighter section, I think. Certainly the more complex section. Oh, this is amazing—come on, you can do it! You’ve got like 30 meters left. That’s tricky—tricky for me on a bike. There we go—can it do it? 10 meters left—did it clear it out? That is astonishing—easily, by far, the best tracking drone out there, period.

Final Thoughts

Oh, it even came towards me—yeah, I’m talking about you! Good job, little buddy—high five! There we go—good job. That is amazing. Now, the thing is, tracking is only one piece of a drone—especially if that drone ends up in multiple pieces. In terms of whether or not to buy this drone, I’ll have a full review coming up that covers all the other pieces. While this thing is amazing at tracking like this, it’s not super awesome at most other things. So, this is really a drone you want for tracking more than anything else, versus the DJI world, where it’s the best for everything else but so-so—and getting better—at tracking. So again, a separate video on this as a general drone, including some of the quirks you saw earlier, like it wouldn’t take off and gave random error messages—all that kind of stuff. But in terms of the gauntlet, this thing reigns supreme.

A Little Secret

Here’s a little secret: this is actually the second time it’s done this. I did this a couple of months ago and never finished editing it. I’m happy to say: one, it’s still the same drone, still alive, with a couple more scratches; and two, it did exactly the same thing as the first time around, but even better. The first time, I didn’t do this on the bike—I just ran it—but now it nailed it on the bike, and that is super cool. So anyways, there you go. Thanks for watching, and have a good one!