AUTONOMY ALLOWS SAFE

All of those improvements are great, but it’s the autonomous features that are the huge change with the Phantom 4, so let’s dig in deep. It’s clear that there are still big limitations. The coolest new feature by far is TapFly. You have a live feed from the drone’s main camera on the screen of your mobile device. Tap anywhere on that image and the drone will fly in that direction. The drone will automatically ease into turns, avoiding the jerky motion that I often got in my footage while flying manually.

AUTONOMY ALLOWS SAFE, EASY, BUT LIMITED FLIGHT
The limitation here is that you are mostly moving in one direction — forward _ which is the only direction in which the obstacle avoidance works. The sensors have a 60 degree field of view, meaning you can only turn at a roughly 30 degree angle, all the while moving forward. If you want to execute a tight turn or head back the way you came from, you’ll need to get on the control sticks or use the automatic "return to home" function.

The obstacle avoidance is quite cautious. Sometimes when I asked it to navigate through a stand of trees with a few feet of clearance on either side, it refused. TapFly also declined to work when you were too low, for example right after an automatic takeoff. That meant I had to touch the sticks a little before switching over to rely totally on the screen of my mobile device.

The other big autonomous feature is AutoTrack. You select a subject — a person, a bike, a car — and the drone will lock on and keep them in the center of the frame. It does this using the same computer vision technology employed for obstacle avoidance, except this time it’s building a 3D model not just of the environment, but also of the target you want to track.