Of you’ve followed various product threads at RCG you might have run across a guy called Vegasrobbie. He either owns or runs a custom off road vehicle outfit somewhere in Nevada and he makes extensive use of follow, active track functions with various brands to showcase his work and products. You can review his stuff on YouTube.
Where follow modes and obstacle avoidance is concerned I doubt very seriously if anyone has put all the models through more in field testing than he has. When the S-1 came out he ran it hard and put it away wet with his assessment having the S-1 with the best OA than any other by a significant amount.
If the S-2 does even better there probably isn’t any competition worth mentioning where OA is concerned.
I've seen a few of his on the Skydio sister forum. Along with his, and several others making offroad trail promo videos. He also used the Typhoon H too... great collection. Although most were vehicle sized paths and pretty much open range territory.
I found the tight bike trails & turns displayed the "tracking" strengths & weaknesses. Even with the beacon, the tighter dense trails still presented a hard time navigating the narrow trail with small twigs. Although technologicaly, not cinematic... It's impressive how it will often "find" a route through with a few "trial & error" attempts; although not at a pace to be useful to record the activities.
The section I found that displayed it's technology the best was the bike trail along the river with a row of trees on both sides. That was smooth, and able to change trail sides while riding the bike at a fast pace over 20mph... meaning not much attention to the S2 and a pretty fast pace in tree lines. Both the trees and bridge on trail displayed where the S2's OA excels. Solo person can create impressive video, similar to current 2-person creations.
The area where it clearly beats the M2P is due to the beacon on person... similar to VegasRobbie's use of the H's Magicwand. Passing behind brush or buildings, M2P predicts your unseen path, where the S2 tracks via beacon... that works better. Add in the S2 optical avoidance and processing matrix, the S2 does very well... but still not fast enough for tight trails. It was mentioned in one of DC Rainmakers video his conversation with Skydio and how the optical, as with 1st Skydio version, uses only 1 meter distance which is probably what effects the thicker trails... not looking far enough forward to reroute smoother.
Overall, it looks to be a major advancement in OA. It's not perfect... in some situations it'll challenge or beat human control, and in others won't approach the smoothness of manual control or advanced decisions on routing.
Next generation OA technology, might be similar to method of Human that visually inspects the intended flight path, essentially a pre-flight walking & inspecting route. If they incorporate a pre-flight memory, and allow the pilot to pre-fly the route so it can record technical challenging areas, an autonomous flight with adv OA would become very impressive.
