Don’t Trust Your Expensive Autonomous Drone To Always Be Autonomous 

Don’t Trust Your Expensive Autonomous Drone To Always Be Autonomous 

Everybody is super excited about affordable, portable autonomous drones this year. Well, affordable might be stretch. The badass new DJI Inspire costs $US2900, but it can fly around shooting video in 4K without any help. One problem: A bug in the firmware is making Inspire drift randomly — and crash.

Just ask Mark Taylor. The experienced drone pilot recently bought DJI’s expensive new masterpiece and was excited to use the drone’s auto-takeoff feature to “do a house fly-by for real estate”. (This is potentially illegal, but we won’t tell.) After experiencing some “shimming and drifting”, Taylor decided to film a flight so that he could send the feedback to DJI. “This happened with no operator input just in auto take off mode,” he said in the video’s YouTube description. What happened? The flying robot almost took out his wife!

DJI has confirmed that there’s a bug in the Inspire’s firmware. We can only assume that this dangerous random drifting is related. A fix is reportedly in the works, and we’ve reached out to DJI for more details on the issue.

Nevertheless, Mark Taylor’s scary video is a great reason not to trust your supposedly autonomous drone. We’ve already seen how problematic human drone pilots can be — and more problems are surely to come. We’ve also had our own problems with DJI’s earlier autonomous flight features in the past.

Your very expensive new toy may say it can fly itself, but do steer clear of those propellors. You never know when your drone will get a mind of its own. [YouTube via Daily Dot]

Picture: Michael Hession


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