The $ 999 Skydio 2 drone is one of the most amazing devices I’ve ever touched, but it does have a fair amount of limitations. Two of them: it has been practically impossible to buy, and we found the drone almost shockproof could accident during some landings.
But at least those two specific problems may go away soon. Today, Skydio says it’s back for sale, greatly increasing its production capacity, and the company has just released a major software update that could make landing its drone much easier.
You can check Skydio’s blog post and changelog for the main details, but the most attractive feature is this: The case that comes with your drone now functions as a standalone landing pad.
Skydio CEO Adam Bry tells me that landing has been a complicated problem for a self-contained drone because most people expect them to go straight down to earth. “If the drone starts to get too creative, people end up worried,” he says. But in our tests, we found that making vertically predictable landings left the Skydio 2 with a weakness – it wouldn’t necessarily avoid obstacles after I told it to land, and it might even crash if you weren’t careful where you placed it. down.
Each Skydio 2 now comes with a dedicated landing pad, obstacle avoidance remains on until it’s three meters off the ground, and there’s additional fail-safe manual security: You can “push” the drone to the left, right , forward or backward if you see that, despite your best efforts, it could still cut something on its way down. Bry says the drone will lock in its case within a radius of about 6 feet, so it doesn’t need to be exactly on him to land safely, either.
Plus, Skydio now relies on your phone’s GPS sensors and optional Beacon so it can fly farther from you than before: double the distance to 20 meters with a phone and quadruple 40 meters with the Beacon, so you can film a wide landscape while the drone automatically follows you. He still can’t get closer shots than before, as Bry says the company wants to keep a minimum distance for safety, but “we are comfortable marking the range.”
Skydio has not had a particularly easy time with the COVID-19 pandemic, as shelter-in-place orders forced him to shut down his small assembly line in Mountain View, California, to the point that he was unable to meet all of your existing preorders and have not taken new ones since March. But Bry says his startup hasn’t had to fire anyone, either, simply putting his manufacturing staff on pay part-time as they weather the storm. “This entire software update was done by people who work from home, collaborated with the test team, and then went out and flew in an empty space when they could,” says Bry. However, he doesn’t see his startup giving up on his expensive Silicon Valley office space in the long run.
Fortunately, Skydio doesn’t just rely on drone sales to stay afloat – it also has some business partnerships for first responders, infrastructure inspections, and the like. Bry says the company also donated 50 drones to public safety agencies during the pandemic through its Emergency Response Program.
The company is launching a new manufacturing facility elsewhere in the United States this summer, and expects to have two to five times production capacity when all is said and done. Bry says Skydio expects to be up to date with all current preorders by the end of September, and that he should be able to buy them directly in October if all goes well.
BTW, this won’t be the only feature update for the Skydio 2, as the team believes there’s more they can do with autonomy, video capture, and app features. Bry says it would be great if the Skydio 2 could provide video images from more than one of its seven cameras at once. And “of course,” he says, Skydio is already working on next-gen hardware, though he’s not talking about it at the moment.
