DJI is re-entering the enterprise category with its latest line of drones. The Matrice 200 is the company's latest commercial drone following the release of a series of unmanned aerial vehicles meant for consumers and filmmakers.
DJI, the world's biggest manufacturer of drones, introduced the Matrice 200 or M200 at the ongoing Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona, Spain. The enterprise drone is intended for simpler jobs as compared to the other UAVs in the DJI stable. That doesn't mean, however, that the Matrice 200 cannot hold its own against the task-specific Inspire and Phantom drones. As a matter of fact, the Matrice 200 is based on the popular Inspire 2, a drone intended for shooting professional-quality videos. The Matrice 200 copies some of the Inspire's features such as the aforementioned XT thermal imager and the 30x optical zoom Zenmuse Z30.
As Venture Beat noted, the Matrice 200 was created for jobs that are less fanciful than its other drones. The M200 is meant for surveying sites, inspecting infrastructures like towers and bridges, accessing hard-to-reach areas which make it a great device to have on search-and-rescue missions, and other similar tasks.
The M200 can accommodate up to three cameras at once including a front-facing camera positioned at the nose and another camera with thermal imaging capabilities placed in a dual gimbal positioned under the drone. The third camera is mounted on another gimbal on top of the UAV and can be used to shoot videos from a worm's-eye view. Probably the most impressive feature of the Matrice 200 is its weatherproofing. The all-weather commercial drone has a waterproofing rate of IP43 and can still be operated in snow. The Tech Crunch report, however, quoted a DJI representative who expressed that while the Matrice 200 is built for extreme weather conditions, he "wouldn't fly it through a sandstorm".
DJI hasn't announced yet how much the Matrice 2000 will go but a $1000 price tag is not far-fetched. It is expected to be launched in the second quarter of this year.
