Transcription
Is the Matrice 4 Enterprise the new king of drone mapping and modeling? How does it compare against the M3E? And is this drone even worth upgrading to?
Well, in this video, we're going to be putting the drone through its paces to see all the new technology that DJI launched alongside with it and see if it's either a gimmick or their game-changing features that you should be implementing into your mapping and modeling projects.
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Hey guys, Dylan Growman here. Welcome back to another video. For those of you who don't know who I am, I've been a commercial drone pilot for the last 6 years, primarily focusing on drone mapping, 3D modeling, and LiDAR data acquisition. And honestly, I've been waiting for this drone for quite a while.
First of all, what is it and who is it for? Well, it's the predecessor to the Mavic 3 Enterprise, which I've got right here, and it's a big upgrade compared to this drone. So, why are they calling this the Matrice 4 Enterprise and not the Mavic 4 Enterprise? Well, as a way for DJI to distinguish the consumer versus the enterprise line, they're switching all of their enterprise drones to the Matrice side and all the consumer side to a Mavic or an Air or a Mini.
So, when it came to the Mavic 3 series, there's actually eight different variants of the drone, and it got really confusing between what is the enterprise versus what is the consumer versus what is the Cine. It was just a jumbled mess of two different lines with the same naming schema. Where now, with the Matrice line, they'll have the Matrice 4 and probably the 40 series and then the 400 series.
So, now that we've got that out of the way, let's actually take a look at what you get with your Mavic 4 Enterprise. First of all, this box is way bigger than what you get with the Mavic 3 box. I mean, clearly, DJI had it grow up a little bit. Other than the size difference, it's pretty much kind of the same case. You still get the same locks on the front here. And then actually opening it up, you actually have your entire system here.
So, on the right-hand side is where you'll put all of your batteries. Here is your gang battery charger, which one thing I do like is they still kept the 100-watt charger, same thing from the Mavic 3 Enterprise side. So, you'll still be able to dually charge your batteries and your new smart controller here.
So, before you had the RC Pro, which obviously is a much smaller controller, and one of the biggest complaints is that it was kind of hard to manipulate maps and create your different flight plans. For now, you have the RC Plus 2, and obviously, the RC Plus 2 takes inspiration from the RC Plus that, well, this one is from my M350. It's the same thing that you get with the 30 series and as well as the Agras drones. So, same big screen and pretty much button layout. There's just a little bit of a different configuration when it comes to the ports that are on it. So, you still have an HDMI and a USB-A, but now on the RC Plus 2, they put your USB-C and micro SD on the bottom.
Another big upgrade of the RC Plus 2 compared to the RC Pro is this had four antennas, and this now has eight antennas. So, when it comes to the transmission, obviously, the Mavic 3 Enterprise had the O3 transmission, and now the Matrice 4 Enterprise has the O4. You get a significant bump in transmission distance, which is really good across the board. It doesn't necessarily mean that, hey, you're going to be flying 25 kilometers away. It now means that you'll have better connectivity at closer ranges, which is always a plus.
And then, as for the drone itself, popping out, yes, it is much bigger. Obviously, the camera configuration here, you get three visual cameras and then you have a laser rangefinder on here. And we'll talk about what each camera is compared to what you get from the Mavic 3 Enterprise.
So, looking at both of these drones side by side, obviously, the profile of the M4E compared to the M3E is significantly bigger. One of the biggest upgrades is the actual top of the drone here. So, as we can see, they've actually shifted the RTK hat, and it's actually not a hat anymore. It's directly integrated into the drone, which now frees up the PSDK port, which before was taken up by the actual module, the RTK module. Which, one of the biggest downsides of that is you couldn't put some of the other modules on the drone and still have RTK. Which, with RTK, you don't just get better positional data in all your images, but you actually get better trajectory with the drone flying from waypoint to waypoint, which is 95% of the time of what these drones are going to be doing.
Opening these guys up is pretty much the same. It's a Mavic. It's a Matrice now. As you can see, the profile of the M4E encompasses a much bigger area when compared to the M3E. When it comes to the batteries, unfortunately, all your M3E batteries will not work in the M4E. It is significantly bigger, right, as you can see here. So, yeah, all the money that you put into batteries on your Mavic 3 Enterprise, well, it's going to have to just live with that drone, 'cause now you got to buy new batteries. Yay for the M4E or the M4T. But you do get a pretty nice bump in terms of milliamp hours. You get about a thousand more hours in the M4E battery compared to the M3E battery.
When it comes to the vision positioning sensors, they're all pretty much in the same spots as before, except now you don't get the upwards sensors because it's more so integrated into the vision sensors here. You still get the beacons on the back, and then on the bottom, you get actually an enhanced array of cameras on the M4E when compared to the M3E.
And probably the most distinguishing difference between the M3E and the M4E is, well, your actual payloads themselves. So, on the M3E, you have two cameras. On the M4E, you actually have three cameras plus a laser rangefinder. Now, the one area that I am slightly disappointed on the M4E is its main camera. It's actually the exact same thing that's on the M3. They're both 20-megapixel, micro four-thirds, mechanical shutters, 24mm, so good wide-angle focal length. But yeah, it's still 20 megapixels. It's not 30 or 45. I do understand why they did that. They didn't want to cannibalize the P1 camera that you'd get with the M300 or M350. But it would have been nice to see just a little bit of a bump in megapixel resolution on this actual camera.
As for the telephoto on the M3E, it was a 12-megapixel, 162mm, so think of it like a 7x on this camera payload here. Again, it's 12-megapixel. On the M4, you actually get a 70mm and a 168mm, so you get kind of a 3x and a 7x. Think of it like the Mavic 3 Pro camera system.
And as for the last sensor that is on the M4E is your laser rangefinder, that's going to get you 1,800-meter range, which is about a mile distance that this thing can read. That's actually really impressive. Other than that, these drones pretty much function almost the exact same. But when it comes to the actual software itself, they still both run DJI Pilot 2. However, because you are on an RC Plus 2, you have much more processing power in here, which makes me really excited because of the 3D capture modes that are built directly in with this combo that you have right here. I know the M3E tried to do that a little bit with some of the features that they rolled out about a year later after this drone came out. I honestly don't really use it, so I'm really excited to test it out on the M4E to see how the automated mission planning, because there's basically a lightweight version of DJI Terra that runs on this. Which, if you don't understand how insane that is, you're going to see out here in the field very shortly.
To really put the Matrice 4 Enterprise to the test, we're going to compare it directly to the Mavic 3 Enterprise in three real-world scenarios. Given that the most highlighted feature on the M4E is its ability to create dynamic automated flight paths off of a 3D point cloud that it generates on the controller, I have partnered with my civil engineer contact to create a high-resolution model of this building that's right behind me, so that they're able to use this building model for a building as-built to compare it to what was planned digitally.
Now, typically with the Mavic 3 Enterprise, you would take two approaches to this. One would either be done by a fully manual flight, capturing images slowly as you navigate around the building, which can be a pretty tedious process. Since we are just doing this by feel and not in a systematic way, we won't really have a perfect overlap, but something that's kind of just good enough. The second option would be to use the slope feature built into DJI Pilot 2. In my experience, the amount of time that it takes to properly set up the slope mission plan, to then actually capturing data, and then realizing that the drone is just going to want to stop every 10 to 15 feet because there are obstacles in the way, gets very frustrating, which then I'll just opt to flying it manually anyways.
This is where the DJI M4 changes the entire game around automated 3D capture. And the best part is that you don't need to pay a $10 to $15,000 software license to enable this feature. You get it right out of the box.
So, really, how easy is it to do this automated 3D mission plan? Well, there's really only three steps that you need to do. The first one is you actually just need to do a very basic flight of the environment that you want an automated 3D mission on. To do that, we're going to do this flight route here. We're going to create a brand new one. We're going to do an area route, and we are going to do this building that's just to the right of me here. We'll create a very basic mission plan, doesn't have to be perfect. Make sure our drone is selected, and I'm just going to call this 3D building. We're going to do an oblique collection. We're going to make sure that smart oblique is set on, and we want to make sure that local mapping is also turned on. For a flight route altitude, we are obviously going to drop it well below 600 feet, and I'm going to do 180 feet. So, it'll take about a minute and 43 seconds to gather all of these photos. We're going to keep the default settings the exact same, and we'll keep our speed the exact same too. Once we're satisfied, we'll just hit the save button. We're going to click play. We'll click next. We're just going to have all of these basic settings here. We'll upload our flight mission. Once we hit start, the drone is just going to gather all the photos for the area that we set it to. So, we can see we are now getting a very nice, basic facade capture, but that's not the full story. Once it's done, the drone is going to return back to us. And keep in mind what happens with that local mapping mode when it's toggled on.
Now that the drone has completed its mission plan, we can move on to step two. We can see in the top left-hand corner, it says "Local Mapping Progress." It's at 29%. What's happening here is those 75 photos that were gathered are now being downloaded to the controller. The controller is then going to process it into a very low-resolution 3D point cloud. That 3D point cloud gives us the dimensions of the building in the rough estimate spot on an XYZ coordinate, so that when we go into step three, as soon as local mapping progress is done, we can create our automated 3D mission plan.
Now, to create our mission route here, we're going to go into "Create a Route." We're going to do our "Smart 3D Capture" option in the bottom right. We're going to pick this new local mapping file that was just generated. We're going to click OK. And as we can see, we have this full 3D model of what we just captured with our oblique mission plan. So, I'm just going to do the front facade of this building here. And simply by tapping a few points, it's going to create a few points here on the point cloud. I'll hit the play button, and that looks like good area of coverage. We'll hit check, make sure we got the right drone selected, and from here, it's automatically going to start generating the route in the background as I start inputting some of my other settings. And there is our mission planned. Now we can just click play, and I'm going to keep the default settings here. Make sure that I put my camera mode into auto, since it's going to be looking all over the place. Upload flight mission here. We'll click start. We go into our camera mode, and when this drone spins around, you're going to see a virtual path that it's going to be flying. We also have this virtual space that if we click on it, we can see exactly where the drone is and where it's going to fly. Now we can see the drone is autonomously capturing pretty much this entire facade, a whole lot easier than what the M3E can do. Again, this is a fully autonomous capture here. And so, it's really that easy to auto-capture a full 3D model with the M4E.
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Let's take a look at what we actually generated. But first, see how the M4E handles surveying and mapping. Just a little over two years ago, when I made my video on the M3E, I called it the king of drone photogrammetry and mapping because it was a huge step up in the industry for such a small drone to do what it did. Now, don't get me wrong, just because the M4E came out doesn't make the M3E irrelevant, as it's still an incredible mapping drone and will still be for a long time to come.
So, why even consider the M4E if I just told you the M3 is perfectly fine? Well, let's take a few things into consideration here. The actual capture speed of the camera has gotten faster, from 0.7 seconds on the M3E to now 0.5 seconds. That doesn't seem like much, but when you're gathering large sites, that bump in speed allows you to just get the job done faster.
The second item is, well, the camera gimbal itself. I know this video is an M4E versus the M3E, but for those of you who have never experienced the P1 camera gimbal on the M350 in its smart oblique mode, well, now you can in the cut-down version on the M4E. Since DJI gave this camera gimbal so much more operational movement, you are now able to do the smart oblique mode in one single flight with the M4E, rather than two or five flights on the M3E. This significantly speeds up the time of capture and reduces the overall amount of flight time and time that you need to spend out in the field gathering data.
So, in an environment like what we have behind me here, where my surveyor needs to complete stockpile calculations, time is money. Now, I'm fully aware that you can get those calculations with pure nadir images, but I have found that capturing oblique images of sites like what we have here has increased the confidence levels on the models and point clouds generated by popular photogrammetry software, which in turn gives my surveyor more accurate data and confidence in the overall calculations. Let's actually see what I'm talking about and put this into action.
First, let's take a look at how we would do oblique capture mode on the M3E. So, to set up an oblique mission, we're going to go to our flight route, going to click the plus button, create a route, area route, and we're going to select this site right here. Now that we have our area selected, we're going to make sure that the drone is selected here, and we're going to call this M3E oblique. We will select the oblique collection, and by default, it's going to go into the smart mode. Me personally, I don't like flying in the smart oblique mode, as it doesn't really give you full control over how fast or slow the drone can fly. It's just going to give you a range. So, I opt to turn smart oblique off, and now we can see that there are five flight missions. We still need to turn our altitude down, so I'm going to bring it to our ceiling of 200 feet. We'll do 199, and we can see that our first flight is going to take about 5 minutes and 40 seconds, or second about 5 minutes, third a little over 5 minutes, fourth about 5 minutes, and fifth about 6 minutes. So, this is going to take a total of 28 minutes, and that's flying at the fastest speed, which I typically don't recommend. But we're going to give it the benefit of the doubt, and we will be flying with our RTK mode. So, in 28 minutes, this is going to gather all the images that we need.
As for the oblique capture on the M4E, let's take a look at how that is done. So, we'll click the play button. We're going to create a route. We will do our area route, and we're going to load in this area that we're looking at here. By simply tapping in the same areas that we tapped with the M3E, we have selected our area here. We'll have our drone selected. We'll call this M4 oblique, and then we're going to click our oblique collection. And with the smart oblique, let's make sure again we drop our flight altitude to 199 feet. So, this will take about 20 minutes to capture, 8 minutes less than the M3E. And even though, you know, 8 minutes doesn't seem like a long time, if you're constantly out here flying these projects to do these stockpile calculations, that's a lot of time saved over the long run.
Now that we've finished the oblique mission planning for both the M3E and the M4E, I'm going to let them both carry out the actual mission plans itself, and then we're going to continue for our final real-world scenario.
So, let's go look at how the M4E performs in asset inspection with some telecom towers. In telecom tower inspections, drones are typically used for gathering high-resolution images of components like antennas, cables, and the actual tower structure itself. A typical inspection workflow would involve gathering hundreds of images while the drone does a full orbit around all of the components of a tower, with usually the M3E's main 20-megapixel camera, which really never struggled with this task at all. And given that the M4 is carrying the exact same 20-megapixel main sensor, it should hold up the exact same, which I can confidently say that it does. So, no real difference there.
But what if you needed to do detailed inspections of the actual cables that are attached to the antennas, or maybe even the bolts and clamps that are holding the entire antenna array to the tower structure? The only option that you had with the M3E was to use the 7x camera, which when compared to the main camera on the M3, it's a 20-megapixel f2.8. So, the image quality quickly fell apart because the max aperture on the 7x camera was f4.4. And if you don't understand what an aperture does, think of it as how much light is being able to hit the camera sensor itself. On the other hand, the M4E, with its 3x and 7x cameras, are both at an f2.8 aperture, so it lets in so much more light and overall produces a much better image, even at that same 7x zoom level.
To see how this works in the real world, let's take both of these drones and put them into action.
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First up, let's see how the M3E performs these detailed 7x inspections. So, with our tower and frame here, right, we're now looking at the 20-megapixel main wide camera. And then to switch over to the zoom, we're going to go into the zoom part. And now I'm going to just put my drone into tripod mode so I can inch a little bit closer to the actual tower so I can position myself in a way that allows me to get up underneath and check out where these cable connections are for the antenna. And we're going to tilt the gimbal up as much as we can. So, we'll have to just raise the drone. I'm going to click on the actual antenna itself and we'll take a picture. Let's say that we want to take a look at the cable connection on this antenna right here. Now, granted, with that f4.4 aperture, if we look at our shutter speed, one over 200th of a second, that's pretty slow. So, any movement is probably going to create a bit of motion blur in our final images. And again, what I could do is maybe go in and change from auto and go to manual and then just increase my ISO. Maybe we increase our shutter to, I don't know, 500th of a second and our ISO to 200 so we have a bit more light here. Okay, and then we'll focus. There we go. So, we'll grab a few images there. Okay, now let's position to maybe let's look at some bolts for the clamps that are holding these antennas in place. And we'll zoom back in once again. We'll focus on the actual clamp right here. We've got a little bit of wind pushing us too. I'm going to try and grab this photo as quickly as I can. Right, so you can see it's a bit of a tedious process, especially with not having a lot of light that's able to get into the actual camera sensor itself.
So, why don't we go ahead and throw up the Matrice 4 Enterprise and take a look at both the 3x and the 7x, given that, well, we have an additional camera option on that drone. I think we should use it. Now, for the M4, one thing that's actually happening right now is we do have some cloud coverage that is coming over. When I first got to this site, it was perfectly sunny. And with changing lighting conditions, which is probably what's going to happen if you are doing a lot of telecom inspections, you're not always going to have optimal light. Which means having the ability to have more light hit the sensor gives us more control over the actual clarity in the image.
So, let's go ahead and do some of the similar shots that we did with the M3. And also, given that our gimbal has about 50 degrees more range of tilt, we can now actually angle it up a little bit better. So, if we get right underneath in between both antenna arrays, look at our same spot, and we're going to switch into our zoom. So, it's automatically going to push us into a 7x. I'm just going to zoom out to our three. We can now get two different kinds of shots. We can get a context shot with the 3x, and then we can get a tied-up close detailed shot with our 7x. So, once again, I'm just going to reposition. Let me go into the wide so it's a little bit easier, and then we're going to go ahead and zoom in. So, here is our 3x, and again, we're on an f2.8 aperture. All right, so we're going to gather, make sure we're on focus, take a photo. And then we're going to use the 7x to get that more detailed shot. So, we'll drop down a little bit, tilt up. So much easier to get that context and detailed shot. We can even just grab a quick 20-megapixel image. We'll then zoom in. So, now we have a context shot, and then we'll zoom in once more, and we can get that detailed shot, which it looks like it's actually getting a clearer image, even on the same 7x. Although again, we have an f2.8 aperture, we can get more light, more clarity in our image itself.
Now that we've completed our mini asset inspection of this telecom tower with both the M4E and the M3E, let's hop in front of the computer and take a look at all three of these real-world project sites and see exactly how the M4 stacks up against the predecessor of the old king of drone photogrammetry and find an ultimate winner here.
Now, let's take a look at all three of these real-world projects comparing the M3E against the M4E. I've already gone ahead and processed everything, so we can just go ahead and take a look at it. In addition to that, if you want access to all of these raw data sets, take a look down below. There's a link where you can download each individual project file.
So, let's first take a look at our 3D facade capture, comparing the M3E against the M4E here. I decided to process this within DJI Terra, and this is the very basic facade capture that I did with the M3E. Overall, I mean, this does look good. Like, granted, you know, if I got more photos, it wouldn't be so melty that we have on the side here. But overall, I think the image quality is good. I mean, granted, we are using a 20-megapixel camera and we're only about 10 feet off of the building, so we should be getting really good resolution. Some of the areas where this does kind of fall apart is the actual 3D modeling side of it. Given that we are only capturing from one angle, yes, I absolutely could have changed the gimbal tilt on the M3E, but in terms of when it comes to efficiency, right, this took about a minute and a half to gather all 35 of these photos. It wasn't as efficient as a process that you would do with the slope. So, to replicate this around the entire property, there's a lot more work that is involved. Plus, you're also getting a whole lot less context. Yes, you can absolutely mesh this data with other data sets. Again, I think when it comes to the efficiencies of it, there's a lot of work that has to be done in order to generate the model that you'll probably be looking for.
Now, to take a look at the M4E with its smart 3D capture, this is the model that it was able to produce. I mean, granted, like, it's way better than what we had before. And if I also turn on our camera positions, we can see every single spot that an image was taken. And you can also see that because it does it in a five-directional capture, we're getting a whole lot more context of the area. This took, like I said, about 11 minutes out in the field. Yes, that is 11 times longer than the minute or minute and a half that it took with the M3 for the manual capture. But if we also zoom out, look at how much more context there is that the drone is actually gathering. It really doesn't take that much longer to generate the full 3D model with the drone with the M4E compared to the M3E, where again, there's a whole lot more manual data gathering required or a whole lot more setup in order to get that systematic approach.
Now, moving on to our mapping and surveying project from the real world. I was actually able to get a trial account from GX, so shout out to the guys over there. This is not sponsored at all. They just hooked me up with a trial account to take a look at how all of this data works in a cloud environment. So, here looking at the Mavic 3 Enterprise, we can see that it, well, it generated an incredible model here. And if we were to turn on our camera positions and zoom out a bit, we can see all of the photos that were gathered. We are left with this incredible model, and then we can actually take a look at the stockpile that I generated for the site, and we can see just how much volume there is for this large stockpile.
So, how does it compare against the M4E? Well, it pretty much looks the same. Which, this is why I'm saying that if you are primarily doing surveying and mapping and some basic inspection work, that the Mavic 3 Enterprise is probably still more than good enough for what you'll be using it for, what you have been using it for. So, really, the only biggest difference here on the M4E capture is that I actually, when I started capturing the data, I had to make an adjustment to one of the settings to match what the M3E was flying. And it actually, they end up taking only 15 minutes to gather pretty much the exact same area, um, but with about 250 less photos. So, in total, 15 minutes compared to almost 30 minutes of data capture was pretty incredible. Regardless, I think spending literally 50% less time on site to gather the same amount of area and overall coverage of the space to still be able to get high accuracy, what we're looking at on here, I think that's incredible. Again, I'm not going to go super in-depth into GX. If you guys want to learn a little bit more about what they have to offer and some of the stuff that they're bringing to the market, take a link down below. Thank you to the GX team for letting me get a trial account for testing out the M3E and the M4E data.
And finally, let's take a look at the telecom tower that we captured. This is just a rough and dirty model that we were able to capture. We have 115 photos that we gathered, and I mean, I think DJI Terra did do a pretty good job. Obviously, you know, I didn't really do that big of a focus on the bottom array, but the top array, I think looks incredible. And we should expect the exact same result from the M4E. But first, I want to take a look at those detailed shots that we got of underneath where the cables attach into the antenna, as well as where the clamps attach to the actual tower itself.
So, here with the M3E photo, I mean, yeah, it's a great photo. We can see the context of it, and I think, you know, we did a few other shots as well, repositioning it, and I can kind of make out that serial number there, or at least the number here for where the antenna is attaching into. Obviously, I can read what kind of antenna it is, but it's not a super clear photo. It's still good. And then switching over to some of the clamp photos here, this is a good photo. There's nothing necessarily wrong with the M3E 7x, but remember, you do lose a bit of quality given that it is an f4.4 aperture compared to the M4E's 2.8 aperture. Which, let's take a look at the difference between those two. And right off the bat, these images do look a whole lot more clear. This one is the 3x, so not the 7x, which we specifically took this one to give us the more context of the area that we're looking at. And then going into our 7x, I mean, yeah, I can already tell there's a huge quality difference between the two. I mean, wow, I'm actually able to properly read even the serial number on this cable here, same with this cable right here. And just remember, this is a very rough and dirty sample set here. I wasn't necessarily taking my time and being careful with it. Even with a rough and dirty capture, we're able to get this much detail this quickly. And I think just overall, having the ability to jump between that 20-megapixel wide to the 3x to the 7x, given that they are both f2.8 apertures, compared to the M3E where the 7x is just a 4.4 aperture, you lose a lot of image quality. Even though the 7x on both cameras are relatively the same focal length, one at 66, one at 62, obviously the one that lets in more light is going to give you a better overall image.
All right, I know that this is a bit of a longer video, but I think I can safely say that the M4E is the brand new king of drone photogrammetry, mapping, and now 3D modeling. If you're someone that still has the M3E, I wouldn't throw that drone away, especially if you're still just doing mapping and basic inspections. It's still a perfect drone. But again, the M4E just builds on top of that. Given that it has those two additional better quality lenses, you still get your 20-megapixel mapping main mapping camera, but you get a whole lot more functionality in terms of the software. It's still running DJI Pilot 2, but again, DJI, after two and a half years of the M3E being out, now with the M4E, you can just again do so much more. And I can't wait to see some of the other updates that come out with it.
Overall, I think that the M4E is the superior drone of choice. I'd love to hear what you guys think in the comments down below. If you've enjoyed this video, please be sure to give it a like. And if you want to see more M4E videos in the future, especially with the 3D modeling, because there's a lot of stuff that I really want to teach you guys about, be sure to subscribe. And one last thing, if you want to see some more behind-the-scenes and actually how I do these projects, become a member today. I have one free video that you can go ahead and watch right now that's linked right here. But if you want to see more behind-the-scenes, fully uncut on actually how I go out, do mapping projects, how I do LiDAR projects, how I even charge my clients, be sure to become a member today. Love to see you there.
With that being said, I will see you guys in the next one.
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