Here’s a few drone shots of the kayak catamaran testing. Not the best videography because the wind had died down a bit and it’s pretty hard to use the drone in these conditions, but it does give you some idea of how the whole set up works and how it rides the waves.
For anyone who is wondering the Skydio2 drone is simultaneously incredible and frustrating. The camera is amazing and the color is great, and the following system works about as well as it can considering we’re talking about visual based tracking system. It really likes a horizon line and steady motion and has difficulty tracking anything looking straight down. The behavior of the drone and also the footage is pretty inconsistent but it’s also literally the only drone that will follow like this. People complain about drones are probably the same people who complain about Wi-Fi on airplanes not working well enough. It’s a flying robot, be satisfied with that.
I fly with my phone only these days which doesn’t have nearly as good a signal as the beacon controller so that’s part of the issue. The Beacon and the phone together provide better tracking but I find that the pairing process combined with setting a home point just eats up too much flight time and it’s too many devices to manage on the water.
Update: I mentioned in this post originally that the Beacon controller doesn’t have return to home functionality (very helpful if you’re flying over water) but Skydio responded that it actually does now. Initially I had a lot of trouble with getting the phone in the beacon and the drone to stay connected with each other and that was eating up too much flight time. But I also notice big improvements with every software update and it’s been a while since I drowned my first beacon, so I just ordered a new one and I’m gonna give phone/beacon flying another try next week!
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