What if Mavic Pro lacked Obstacle Avoidance?

The secret of Mavic Pro’s obstacle avoidance lies in FlightAutonomy, a dual-camera stereo vision system. Speaking of avoidance technology, most drones in the market still use ultrasonic + single camera to calculate the distance between an obstacle and the camera (depth of field). However, ultrasonic, due to its own limitation, can only provide the distance of the obstacle that is most closed to the drone, thus has poor performance in complicated environment.

While Mavic Pro has a dual-camera system, which creates a stereo vision and does 3D scanning to the flight environment in real time. In this way, Mavic always knows where an obstacle is and how far it is. In this system, VO (Visual Odometry) and VSLAM (Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) are the vital parts.

VO serves as a dash board of a car. It calculates current speed, location and flight course of a drone, so as to measure speed and location during flight, two factors determining the drone’s hovering precision and stability.

While VSLAM empowers a drone the ability to sense environment around it, basing on which features like obstacle sensing, tap flying and tracking become a reality. Apart from extracting 3D information from 2D images, VSLAM is also able to build a 3D map and plan a reasonable flight path to avoid obstacles.

Mavic Pro’s vision system is also redundant: both front and bottom two cameras can help the drone hover, and be able to shift to single camera + ultrasonic mode when it’s necessary, always ensuring the system’s stability.

Compare Mavic Pro with many other drones in the market to better see the difference between them. Many drones still stick with the primitive ultrasonic + single camera system, which simply commands drones to stop when obstacles are detected in front, or, at best, turn the drones around to look for obstacles in other directions, having no ability to plan.

We flied Mavic Pro at full speed towards different obstacles, such as walls, football net, cars, trees and bushes, but every time Mavic was able to give fast response, brake and hover 3m away from them.

Just can’t image how many times Mavic would have crashed if it didn’t have obstacle avoidance like this.

Enabling obstacle avoidance before flight is highly recommended. Mavic Pro’s front vision system can sense obstacles as far as 30m away, and 15m away with high precision. It starts to slow down 6-2.5m away from obstacles, and hovers in front of them. If you push the sticks again to continue flying forward, Mavic will not response to your command and gives you a warning.

However, just like human eyes, what Mavic Pro can see is also limited. A 60°angle of view and insufficient light will also possibly lead to failure of recognizing  obstacles like transparent glass, twigs and power lines. So be careful when flying Mavic in such a situation

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