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Comment by wil421 | Hacker News Reader

I do a lot of kayaking (not white water kayaking) and fishing off my kayak in lakes, rivers, and the ocean on calmer days.

Does your style drone have any following features? Looking for something to fly around looking for fish and something that will follow me or do fly-bys when I’m doing something with the family.

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I have a DJI Mini 3 Pro, it has a feature called Active Track[0] where you highlight a subject on the screen and then select how you'd like it to follow you. It can go alongside you or behind you - can follow things like cars too. Despite the sensors, it can be a little scary getting it to follow you when there are trees or telephone lines nearby, but in a lake or the sea it should be great. There are safety features where if it loses connection to the controller it can hover in place, land or return to home (where it took off from).

[0] - https://store.dji.com/guides/film-like-a-pro-with-activetrac...

Yeah, the DJI Mini 3 Pro is that drone... get the basic controller version.

in some form, this was present on DJI drones even 2 generations ago

I thought about that too and they are all not watertight. There are Swellpros that are, but they are not hobby drones. And their specs are no match to current hobby drones.

Not OP but Skydio might have the drones you need?

DJI is a juggernaut and i imagine will catch up, but when i last looked about a year ago Skydio autonomous tracking was dramatically better. It was the first thing that popped into mind when reading that question.

I think Skydio has the best autonomous follow feature I’ve seen so far.

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