DJI Dock 4 is here, and AirHub is ready for it

DJI launched Dock 4 today, with a new aircraft, the Matrice 5TD. The specification sheet is long, and one number on it matters more than the rest: the Dock swaps a depleted battery for a charged one in 25 seconds, where every Dock on the market until now recharged the pack inside the landed aircraft and took around half an hour to do it.

That single change rewrites the arithmetic behind a dock network. Here is what it means for the three kinds of operation we work with most.

What 25 seconds changes about coverage

A dock that recharges in place covers its radius for part of the day. Respond to one emergency, return to the Dock and the drone is not available for the next thirty minutes, which is the window in which the second call arrives. Programmes have worked around this by buying a second dock, which means a second aircraft, a second roof, a second power supply and a second set of permissions, to solve a problem that was fundamentally about one flat battery.

With a 25-second turnaround, availability stops being the limiting factor and distance takes over. The useful calculation becomes simple. The Matrice 5TD cruises to a scene at up to 21 m/s, so a minute of transit covers around 1.25 km in a straight line. Subtract your launch sequence, subtract climb time, and add nothing for the route being direct, because no-fly zones and obstacles make every real route longer than the line on the map. What you are left with is your true coverage radius, and with a swap-equipped dock you hold it continuously instead of for half of each hour.

Flight endurance moves too. A single Matrice 5TD flight runs up to 59 minutes, so a longer sortie is followed by a short pause rather than a long one.

Sergey Georgiev, AirHub´s Senior BD Manager and ex-DJI:

"Every public safety drone team I speak to asks the same question about the gap between flights. Until today the only answer was a second dock. Additionally, one little change will improve operations even further: the increased horizontal speed of 21m/s will allow DFR to be even quicker on site."

Public safety: the gap between the call and the picture

For a Drone as First Responder programme this is the constraint that mattered most. Dubai Police already reaches scenes in around 90 seconds with AirHub, and the published study of their 2023 operations records mean arrival times of 1 minute 25 to 1 minute 28 across 1,502 incidents.

Two other details help here. Drone-to-cloud latency on the new setup is up to 160 ms, roughly a third lower than the previous generation, which shows up as a smoother live view for whoever is making decisions. And full-colour 4K night vision without a spotlight changes what a night-time scene assessment looks like, with an infrared camera alongside it for anything thermal.

The aircraft also carries payloads up to 450 g, including speakers and spotlights. For a search at night, a speaker that can address someone on the ground is a different capability from a camera that can see them.

Critical infrastructure: inspection without swapping airframes

The Matrice 5TD combines telephoto, infrared, laser ranging and night vision on one aircraft, which removes the usual trade-off of choosing a payload before you know what you will find.

The 11× telephoto resolves detail at 400 m and picks up pin-level defects on a power line from 100 m. The infrared camera reveals overheating and damaged insulators. Laser ranging works to 3 km with coordinates overlaid on the feed. Survey accuracy runs to 10 cm.

The obstacle sensing is what makes this usable around live assets. Three-directional mmWave radar, a rotating LiDAR and six-directional vision sensing work together, and the wire-level detection picks up thin obstacles including power lines at night.

Security: overnight patrols that actually run overnight

For perimeter work the charge cycle set the patrol interval, which is a poor way to decide how often you check a fence. Remove it and the interval follows the risk assessment instead.

A few things in this release are aimed squarely at security operations. The built-in customisable warning light works during patrols with nothing to install. Speakers and spotlights are available as payloads. The Dock operates from -40°C to 50°C, preheating batteries in freezing conditions and running air conditioning in heat, and the aircraft takes off, lands and operates in winds up to 12 m/s, with an automatic descend-and-return behaviour if wind spikes while it is out.

Weather is the single largest cause of missed patrols and missed response targets, so a wider operating envelope is worth more than it sounds.

The regulatory detail worth more than it looks

One line in DJI's announcement deserves more attention than it will get. The Matrice 5TD carries a Flight Termination System, which DJI describes as a key technical requirement for C6 compliance, triggered manually or automatically when the aircraft breaches a geocaging boundary.

C6 is the class marking required for STS-02, the European standard scenario for flights beyond visual line of sight. An operation that fits STS-02 runs on a declaration to your national aviation authority rather than a full operational authorisation, and that declaration is recognised across every EASA member state. For a European operator, the difference between the declaration route and a bespoke SORA can be months.

Whether a specific aircraft and configuration actually carries C6 class marking is a question for the manufacturer and your authority, and it is worth asking early, because it shapes your whole timeline. Our regulatory consultancy team works through exactly this question with operators.

Where AirHub fits

A dock that is ready all shift flies far more often, and every one of those flights still needs a route planned, someone watching the feed and a record afterwards. That workload grows in step with the flight count, and it is the part AirHub takes on.

Sergey:

"The increased horizontal speed of the new Matrice 5TD combined with AirHub's SmartDispatch and intelligent route planing allow Public Safety entities to be on site even quicker than before."

Mission planning and saved routes in the mission editor, so a response or a patrol flies the same way every time and one round compares against the last. Live operations and a shared picture in the Drone Operations Centre, so the people deciding see what the aircraft sees. Fleet management across your aircraft, docks and pilots. And a flight record that holds up when an authority asks for it.

AirHub is hardware agnostic by design, which matters more as hardware cycles get faster. A platform tied to one manufacturer ties your fleet decisions to that manufacturer for the life of the programme.

AirHub is also a Dutch company. The platform is ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certified, operates in line with GDPR and European data protection requirements, and can be deployed on-premise or in a private cloud where an organisation needs full control over its operational data.

Our public safety and security pages set out how the pieces fit, and we will be showing the new Dock in action with AirHub shortly.