A dock that charges between flights spends the quiet minutes on the pack. Two launches, then a wait, then two more, and the afternoon is gone in the charge window. Dock 4 spends those minutes on a swap. The next launch waits on the mechanism, not on a full battery. There is no charge between flights. The downtime stays as low as a pack change. That is the reason for this pad.
What a short gap is for
Security on a yard fails in the quiet. A charge window is a hole in the orbit: the aircraft is home, the fence line is unwatched, and the next pass starts when the pack allows it. A swap puts the aircraft back out while the pattern is still warm.
Bird scaring over a crop has the same shape. A long gap is time the flock uses. They settle, feed and treat the last pass as finished. Scaring works when the next pass is airborne before they decide the paddock is theirs again. The dock does not need a new airframe for that. It needs the wait to be a battery change.
Continuous work is the same idea across a shift. Inspection, a perimeter, a block of crop: the route keeps its place in the day because the pad is not parked on a charger. The aircraft comes home, the pack changes, and it leaves on the same task. Lowest downtime is the point. The camera, the speaker or whatever else the flight carries is there to use that short gap, not to fill it.
The camera already sits on the nose. A single payload still fits inside the aircraft. A speaker or a spotlight is that kind of fit, the same as on the docks flying now. Dock 4 has less room in the shell than Dock 3, because the swap mechanism takes it. That squeeze is specific to a kit that carries several payloads at once. WindRise version 1 is that kit. It is an external mounting system, so the loads stay off the bay the batteries need, and the swap still runs.
We sat with that hardware in Shenzhen in May. The photo is the WindRise mount on a dock airframe, not a rule for every payload.
LiDAR on the Matrice 5 airframe is there so the aircraft can work close to the asset, then come home for a fresh pack while the last one is still warm. Photos of a grey airframe have been public since late July. DJI has not published a Dock 4 sheet, and an Australian date is still unannounced.
Talk through the job if the gap between flights has to stay as short as a battery change. Dock 4 is the pad. The Matrice 5DT is the aircraft we are pairing with it. Contact.