Santa brought me a dji neo drone! (OK, I am Santa). This is dji’s response to the x1 hoverair. On its own I think it has pretty similar capabilities, but it also supports connecting to an external controller, and with FPV goggles, if you later want to dive deeper into drone flying. Without a phone or controller you can use controls on the drone itself to set it to fly in one of several patterns, including following you. With a phone connected you can fine tune some of those presets, such as changing follow distance and height.
Here’s a bit of playing with different modes in an open area. I used a lot of “direction track” here, where it tries to stay at a fixed orientation to you, so can fly in front of you or to the side. It doesn’t always succeed, but can get some cool shots when it does.
And here’s another one in the woods. “direction track” doesn’t work very well in this situation since it has no built-in obstacle avoidance. “follow” mode works surprisingly well though. It tries to follow along in your path rather than doing straight point-to-point, but occasionally does end up trying to cut corners and getting itself into trouble.
Edited video:
Single long test shot. At the end the drone gets confused, hesitates, and then managed to cut a corner luckily avoiding some branches. You can see me saying “oh, you made it!” after turning to go back for it.
