The Drones on Autopilot That Follow Your Lead (Usually)
Ghost and Iris+ Trail Their Owners and Take Great Pictures, But Watch Out for That Tree
A new generation of personal drones like the 3D Robotics Iris+ have autopilot systems that can follow you around. Personal Tech columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler takes them for a test flight.
By
Geoffrey A. Fowler
Geoffrey A. Fowler
The Wall Street Journal
Dec. 23, 2014 1:01 p.m. ET
Drones with cameras can bring a stunning aerial dimension to our photos. But pilots of these increasingly popular mini-copters have an unfortunate tendency to crash into things. I myself have flown them into trees, houses…and a friend.
So what if we could remove some of what makes personal drones dangerous—human error?
A new generation like the 3D Robotics Iris+ and the Ehang Ghost can do much more of the flying themselves. They’ve supplemented (or in some cases, replaced) confusing joystick controls with apps that tell them to take off, follow flight paths and land autonomously. And their coolest trick: They can just follow you around, keeping a camera trained on you like floating paparazzi.
The Ghost drone, above, and the Iris+ can be programmed to follow their owners, but they sometimes go off on ‘flyaways’ beyond their owner’s control. Emily Prapuolenis/The Wall Street Journal
Putting my flight casualties behind me, I took these two autopilot drones into a field to see what they could do. They quickly transformed me from a novice pilot to a good one—though learning to trust a machine to fly itself was a white-knuckle experience of its own.
None of the drones I’ve tried is simple or fail-proof. They still require the commitment and experience of a hobbyist. But they provide a glimpse of how drones might soon become a bigger part of our photography culture, the ultimate selfie machines.
There’s a long list of concerns about drones, from short battery life to the potential for privacy invasion. In the short term, I worry most about crashes. We don’t want these flying lawn mowers to buzz by people or drop from the sky. Earlier in December a drone “Mobile Mistletoe” stunt sliced someone’s face when it careened out of control.
The Federal Aviation Administration is considering rules that would require pilots of commercial drones to have a license, but that wouldn’t apply to consumers. Rather than take on the risk, some cities—and all U.S. national parks—have banned even recreational flight.
One popular drone maker, Parrot, has addressed safety by making quadcopters that are so lightweight that they can be used indoors with bumper-guards. It recently began shipping its $500 Bebop drone, which includes a much-improved 14-megapixel fisheye camera. It’s generally the most kid-safe drone you can buy, but piloting it via smartphone app (or even its Skycontroller remote) requires hours and hours of practice.
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The Iris+ drone can be controlled via a smartphone app. Emily Prapuolenis/The Wall Street Journal
Autopilot drones go beyond turning your phone into a joystick. Both the Iris+ (which has been out for a few months) and Ghost (which starts shipping in January) can be commanded via app to fly to specific coordinates. You program the flight path with your finger on the screen. An external antenna, which comes with both models, sends the flight instructions from your phone to the drone.
The Iris+, which sells for $750 without a camera or $210 stabilizing gimbal, has the most sophisticated software. In its DroidPlanner app, available on Android only, you draw on a map the path you want the drone to fly—like around your property or along the beach. When you press launch, off it goes on its own. (You can even share and download flight plans online.)
The app can also suggest other maneuvers, like having the drone circle a building while keeping its camera trained on it. That’s a very tricky move to accomplish with joystick controls. With one tap, you can take an automatic “dronie,” where the camera sweeps away for a dramatic video selfie that will make all your friends jealous. Both of the drones I reviewed are designed to work best with a GoPro , but you could add a different camera.
Ghost, which sells for $375 on its own or $599 with a camera gimbal, offers a streamlined take on these kinds of controls. With its app, also only for Android, it can automatically take off and land, as well as hover and go to the spot on a map that you tap with your finger.
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Geoffrey A. Fowler flies the Iris+ drone. Emily Prapuolenis/The Wall Street Journal
And then there’s Follow Me mode. The drone apps track the location of your phone, and instruct your flying friend to follow along as you move. (And to all you twisted people: No, you can’t tell it to follow someone else.)
For now, Ghost’s Follow Me controls are limited to following above your head at whatever height you choose. Iris+ lets you tell it how far away to fly, and whether the drone should try to follow ahead of the path you’re traveling or to repeatedly orbit around you.
The prototype Ghost I tested sometimes failed to follow, instead just hovering in place. The company says new hardware it plans to ship to customers will improve responsiveness.
Testing this while running around in a field was surreal: The drones tailed me like alien spy probes. Except you’d never miss these drones because they sound like a swarm of angry bees and neither can last more than about 20 minutes on a battery charge.
Still, imagine if you could have a drone levitate just above your car so you could see what traffic looked like up ahead, or follow along and film you while you kayak.
There are other intelligence problems to overcome first. Neither autonomous drone can sense or avoid obstacles that might get in its way. So if something—or, egad, someone—moves into its path after the flight plan goes into effect, you could be in trouble.
The Follow Me function adds another stress: Every once in a while, both drones would just go rogue, a phenomenon the drone industry calls flyaways. The problem is actually with the GPS on the phone that’s commanding the drone—phones aren’t great at sensing location consistently. When they got my location wrong, the drone would go on a wild-goose chase without any real ability to avoid danger on its journey. (The Return Home button still worked as expected. Regardless, I would never fly either of these in crowded areas.)
Autonomous software was certainly helping me fly, but also made flying scarier. What if the map is out of date? What if I programmed the drones wrong? (During this, I’ve learned that I’m terrible at estimating the height of things, an essential skill for eyeballing potential drone missions.)
Every time one went up, my palms got sweaty, my heart rate quickened and scenes from “The Terminator” movies flashed through my head. I kept one hand hovering over the Return Home button at all times.
DJI, which makes the popular Phantom drones, hasn’t put Follow Me controls in its apps. (Its new model, marketed to professionals, is a joystick-controlled $2,900 drone with a 4K camera that can spin 360 degrees while filming.) DJI’s concern is that automating drones before they have the ability to avoid obstacles on their own could be dangerous.
On an Iris+ flying lesson with 3DR design director Jason Short, I asked if letting drones fly themselves with the current state of technology was really a good idea. “This drone is far more likely to come back safely than a manually controlled drone,” he said.
A little later in our lesson, he switched back into manual controls—and soon inadvertently crashed our Iris+ into a pole. One of its arms broke off.
The crash was an accident, but it made his point.
For now, he acknowledged, even autonomous drones take time to master, and are for people who want to make flying a hobby. But it’s clear from the first batch that, soon enough, they may be right for a broader swath of photographers who just want a camera that can find its own way in the sky.