Today, March 28th, 2018, DJI have announced the availability and launch of their Payload SDK.

This is important news for the drone industry since it now means that different sensors, regardless of manufacturer, can now integrate directly into DJI drone platforms, as if they were native.

Previously, sensor manufacturers had to essentially bolt their products directly onto the drone, meaning that the sensor itself wasn’t even able to access critical metadata from the flight, like altitude, heading, or GPS location, and couldn’t even be controlled by the drone’s software. OEMs are still literally embedding an entire secondary autopilot into sensors because of this.

Now, sensor OEMs can ditch the extra weight of the added, redundant components, and just plug into the DJI drone and piggyback directly off of the drone’s existing flight controller and IMU. Operators can now even control the 3rd party sensor directly from DJI’s own app.

Of course, this is all tailored to and made possible by DJI’s large, projected 70%+ holding of market share. But that’s not a novel situation these days and by and large, DJI continues to make the most user-friendly, easiest-to-adopt drones on the market.

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On this exclusive interview, you’ll hear directly from DJI and two of their sensor partners, FLIR and SLANTRANGE, who both have adopted DJI’s Payload SDK and integrated their products with it.