How Will the DJI Matrice 200 Change the Commercial Drone Landscape

DJI Enterprise have announced the all new Matrice 200 Series, and this product is set to be a real game changer.

The current large commercial survey and inspection work, are being done by drones like the Falcon 8, the Zenith, the Albus, and they are all a lot more expensive. These units cost around £25,000.
The proposed price point of the new Matrice Series models M200, M210 and M210RTK are rumored to be priced a lot less than the current competition.
There is a long list of features for the M200 drone and it can fly in freezing temperatures and pouring rain.
– Integrated FPV Camera
– Upward, Downward and Forward Vision Sensors
– Dual Battery Setup
– Dual Gimbal Payload Available
– 7km Operational Range
– 38 Minute Maximum Flight Time
– IP43 Level Ingress Protection
– 2kg Maximum Payload Capacity
– ActiveTrack and POI Flight Modes
The DJI Enterprise target market is commercial drone inspection work on power lines, search and rescue, wind turbine inspection, solar panel and bridge inspection.  It takes drone photography to a new level.
They are also targeting the offshore rig and telecoms markets.  The areas we are interesting in using the Matrice 200 are for aerial drone building surveys, drone roof surveys and aerial inspections.
With the ability to configure an upwards facing gimbal, the M210 and M210 RTK drones are able to view a broad set of industrial assets that inspectors previously had to bring multiple tools to inspect.
This improves inspection turnaround times and significantly lowers equipment expenses, as their M200 Series drones works as an all-in-one inspection solution.
DJI have added some interesting features to make the aircraft more appealing, on the RTK’s the ADS-B receiver feature lets you know where aircraft are in your area.
DJI Enterprise are claiming a 2-kilogramme payload with this drone, which is just amazing for something that’s going to be this affordable.
It has the ability to put two cameras on at once, which is going to be excellent for search and rescue applications. It can use a thermal camera to find them and a visible-eye camera.
There is still a question of redundancy with the Matrice 200 only available as a quadcopter, but for almost all of the survey situations that you come across, you would actually be able to use this smaller, lighter, cheaper aircraft to deliver the goods.
Some large inspection clients will demand the redundancy of 6 or 8 rotors from a safety point of view, but the cost, durability and strength of the new Matrice 200 series will definitely change how we think about doing this work.
There are 6 camera options on three different gimble positions.

Here is a extract from the DJI information pack

The Matrice 200 series is a new line of enterprise drones, was built from the ground up to assist in critical infrastructure and energy projects. To those unfamiliar with the application of drone technology, it centers around capturing geo-referenced data from a wide range of sensors which not only drive efficiency gains in current methods, but also enable the development of new data intensive methodologies.
Furthermore, many inspections require engineers to scale tall structures. Such methods are not only time consuming due to the necessary safety preparations, but also inherently dangerous. Existing practices must leverage the opportunity drone technology affords and put workers at risk only when all other options have been exhausted.

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