Props to the props

For max flight time you want to run the largest props possible. Astro uses 21 inch props on a drone body that’s only 14 inches square.

96% of our total area is props!

So why doesn’t every drone do this?

It’s hard!

As you increase prop size it becomes more and more difficult to accelerate and decelerate the prop. Ever notice how FPV drones use absurdly small props? They trade prop size / flight time for control bandwidth.

On Astro we spent years developing motor drive HW and control algorithms that allow us to have huge, slow-spinning props with incredible stability. This allows Astro long flight times, incredible precision, and super low noise footprint.

SuperLight Batteries

Astro features the latest in 21700 round cell lithium ion battery technology. As the battery industry releases new chemistry we are able to drop that new and improved tech into our SuperLight (SL8) battery platforms.

SL8 Batteries have an OLED screen, comprehensive protections and diagnostics, and an integrated USB C PD port to power all your accessories in field.

Astro is designed to be able to fly on one battery in the event of a pack failure in flight and Freefly guarantees the batteries for an industry leading 500 cycles.

Battery data for each pack is stored in Auterion Suite for easy fleet tracking and performance analysis.

Acceleration Matters

It’s easy to make a drone fly. It’s very hard to make one fly well.

You want your drone to be smooth, precise, and agile when needed.

You need motors and motor drives that can speed / slow the motors props as quickly as possible.

During testing we were able to accelerate the motor at 40kHz/s. Any faster than this would cause the prop to start to fold up in its folding adapter.

Luckily this slew rate was fast enough for Astro to fly wonderfully, but if you see fixed props or a new innovation in the prop adapter from Freefly in the future you will know why…..we are always chasing that next improvement that allows us to fly longer, faster, and more precisely than before.

Smart Dovetail

Freefly lives to create drones, gimbals, and cameras! We want to accelerate the entire industry with our ecosystem. Too often in the past we have had to create every part of a system from scratch which is slow and takes insane resources. As we completed each building block in our robotics ecosystem we make them available for partners to leverage.

Smart dovetail was designed by Freefly to create a standard interface for payload manufacturers to allow any compliant payload to work on any compliant drone.

We know that each additional payload drives the industry forward, and being able to use them across your fleet helps you get your job done. Contact us today or buy a smart dovetail integration kit to get started.

RTK GPS

GPS satellites are 12,550 miles above the earth surface. Using the ublox F9p Astro is able to lock onto 20+ of these satellites and achieve a stable hover in even the windiest conditions. If this isn’t quite enough performance you can add our RTK base station and the accuracy goes up 10x. Every time I watch this drone sit perfectly above a point, and think about the fact that the positional data is coming from medium earth orbit my mind is blown.

With our unique velocity clamps on Pilot Pro you can take advantage of all this precision by adjusting Astro’s max velocitis real time and on the fly. Cruise to your inspection location at high speed, but then click into slow mode and adjust position at .1m/s.

Astro is fast, precise, and adaptable.

61 MP in Your Backpack

We started taking pictures from drones in 2003. We had small CCTV cameras duct taped to the eye pieces of the first SLRs and our max flight time was 2.5mins. Crashes were frequent, and the struggle was intense!

If you told us then we would have a drone that carried a 61mp imager, flew for over 30 mins, and could hold its position down to centimeter accuracy we would not have believed you.

Astro is the most packable drone to offer this type of flight time and resolution. Throw these 2 cases in your truck and tackle any challenge!