DJI-MATRICE 30

You wouldn’t want to fly most drones in a serious downpour, even most industrial-grade ones from DJI. Until today, DJI’s state-of-the-art was the M300 RTK,  but where , that snow and heavy rain are not OK for flying. But DJI’s weather sealing and confidence rating have improved — the new DJI M30 Enterprise, announced today, is explicitly ready for “heavy rain, high winds, high altitudes, even in icy and snowy conditions from -20° C to 50° C,” according to the company.

 Image: DJI

The M30 is also more portable than practically any of the company’s other industrial drones — small enough to fit into a large backpack or small rolling case — and with self-locking arms that snap into place and can be folded with the push of a button instead of having to screw and unscrew each one like on previous Matrice models. While the 8.2-pound drone still has the tubular arms common to industrial UAVs, the design’s a lot closer to the Mavic that helped DJI dominate the foldable drone category.

Image :DJI

The maximum 41-minute flight time means the M30 doesn’t have quite the endurance of DJI’s longest-lasting drones, but DJI’s taking advantage of its size in another way — it’s finally revealed its own robotic drone-in-a-box solution for completely autonomous missions, one small enough to work on the back of a pickup truck.

The DJI Dock has its own built-in weather station, surveillance cameras, antennas, 25-minute automatic fast battery charging, and can support drone mission up to 7 kilometers away, though do note the fine print there:

The DJI Dock must be used in accordance with applicable laws and regulations, and its advanced functions cannot yet be used in jurisdictions where a human pilot must stay within the drone’s line of sight or maintain physical control of the drone by holding a controller.

One of those “jurisdictions” is the USA, though the FAA has been taking steps towards letting automated drone-in-a-box missions proceed on a case-by-case or company-by-company basis. Most prominently, 

The Dock does need dedicated power and internet access, though DJI says there’s an internal battery for power failures, and it can support a 4G dongle.

 Image: DJI

Camera-wise, there are actually two models of the M30: the M30 and the M30T. I’ll let DJI explain:

The M30 model integrates a 48 megapixel 1/2’’ CMOS sensor zoom camera with 5×~16× optical and 200× digital zoom, a 12 megapixel wide-angle camera, 8k photo 4K/30 fps video resolution, and a laser rangefinder which can give the precise coordinates of objects up to 1,200 meters away. The M30T features an additional 640x512 px radiometric thermal camera.

There’s also six-way obstacle avoidan