Much like everything in 2020 – DJI’s annual industry event, AirWorks, adapted to the ‘new normal’ of COVID-19 and went digital. Commercial drone professionals, policymakers, technology experts and general enthusiasts met (digitally) and discussed the future and what’s next, exchanged innovative ideas, built new relationships.
In case you missed this year’s event or just want a recap, here – in this blog, we will discuss the key takeaways from the AirWorks 2020 event.
DJI’s Themes & Vision
DJI approached each day with a new theme:
Day 1: Innovation Through Change
Day 2: Resilience Through Joint Innovation
Day 3: Challenges and Next Steps for the Industry
Source: DJI
In the kickoff Keynote, DJI’s Senior Brand Manager, Christopher Tuazon, explained their vision and the key areas where DJI plans to invest in the coming years:
An integrated ecosystem of products
Optimizing DJI drones for geospatial data collection, and
A move toward intent-driven flights
Source: DJI
To quote Tuazon:
“It isn’t useful to enterprises if we just offer one part of the stack – the drones. We are looking to create a complete ecosystem of products that go from flight control to flight and fleet management, all the way to data output,” he said. Product interoperability will be key in this scheme of things and third-party developers can also expect added opportunities to work with DJI in the future.”
Seems to be a lot in store for DJI in this coming year.
Public Safety
As in years past, public safety was a key talking point at this year’s event. DJI’s Senior Director of Public Safety Integration, Romeo Durscher, presented on DJI’s Disaster Relief Program (DRP) – and how 100 drones that DJI provided to 45 agencies in 22 U.S. states participated in its COVID-19 Disaster Relief Support Program.
The lessons learned and best practices observed have been compiled in a ‘Drones for COVID-19 Public Safety Response whitepaper, that can be found here.
New Product Announcements that Created the Most NoisE
Livox Avia: Sub-500-gram LiDAR Sensor
This new LiDAR payload increases the FoV (field-of-view) from 40-degress to 70-degree, doubles the detection range and almost triples the point cloud intensity. It will be positioned to fit onto the following DJI drone models: Matrice 300, 200 or even 100.FLIR: Vue TZ20
FLIR introduced its latest in innovative thermal payloads, the Vue TZ20. It is the first dual-thermal plug-and-play payload compatible with small UAS platforms – such as the M200-series and M300 airframes. The Vue TZ20 was designed with first responders in mind with a wide 95-degree and narrow 18-degree FoV. This allowing for faster search and rescue missions.
New Software Advances
DJI FlightHub, it was stated that a new comprehensive drone management platform would be created. It is speculated that DJI’s FlightHub software will evolve from a fleet and pilot management tool – progressing to a comprehensive mission management platform centered on flight operations.
More should be coming in December.