If you’ve been looking forward to the day Skydio, a self-contained drone startup, becomes a true competitor to DJI, you may have misread today’s announcement. You may have assumed that after two awesome drones that didn’t quite To fulfill its full potential, Skydio’s decision to build its next flying flagship exclusively for the business and military markets meant that it was made entirely with consumers.
But Skydio CEO Adam Bry says The edge It is just beginning: more consumer drones are on the way.
“We have more products in that market that we are excited about,” Bry reveals, saying the time was just right to expand into the business market as well. In both markets, he says, the goal is not to try to beat DJI by copying DJI, but to build drones that can automatically do things that currently require an expert pilot to do.
“Being able to follow you is something an expert pilot could do; Being able to inspect a house is something an expert pilot can do; Being able to inspect a bridge is something an expert pilot can do. How do we put that into the software so that anyone can benefit from it? Bry asks, rhetorically.
Skydio sees himself building specific “AI skills” to do each of those things, starting with some specific examples that the drone’s cameras use to first map the area around him, and then automatically take a series of images from High resolution that can be joined together to create a scan of a house, bridge, or other inspection facility:
Bry says he also sees opportunities for “skills” outside of the company, particularly in the world of filmmaking, where operating a camera also requires expert skills, and where flying cameras could theoretically make camera movements that are almost impossible for filmmakers on the ground.
But he also believes that a different business model may be the way to go: Whether they choose the new foldable Skydio X2 or the consumer-grade Skydio 2, business customers will pay for a subscription service to these new skills instead of just buy them. -Shelf drones.
If this idea of skill-driven drone upgrades sounds familiar to you, you may be thinking about the promising 3D Robotics launch of drones for several years, before it was overtaken by the rapidly advancing line of DJI, it was reliable. and relatively affordable. drones
But history may not repeat itself. Now, governments and industries have become more cautious with products made in China, to the point that the United States Department of the Interior grounded its DJI-made fleet. Skydio is betting that his pedigree made in the US will help him win contracts with business and military clients that DJI can’t touch right now. In fact, the company already has contracts with the U.S. Air Force, Army, and DEA, Informa Cabling.
However, that does not mean that Skydio is ready to become a supplier of weapons systems or that it necessarily helps the police to monitor citizens. The company’s new “Principles of Commitment and Responsible Use” explicitly state that Skydio will not place weapons on its drones and opposes fully automated weapons in general, and Bry tells me that Skydio would not work with a company that plans to place weapons on his drones, either.
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Photo: Skydio
“We believe drones should be involved in emergency response situations, not active surveillance, and I think that’s a pretty clear line,” he says, adding that Skydio also plans to get involved in autonomous drone policy formulation. “You ship a product, you wash your hands … that’s not our focus,” says Bry.
That said, the company is already working with at least one police department in Chula Vista, California, and it’s unclear how it would know if its drones were being abused to monitor protesters or other citizens. For now, Bry is focused on positive use cases, such as how drones could theoretically serve as a kind of flying body camera, and perhaps how they could allow more objective observers (such as a police captain) to do a better job of evaluating a Situation remotely.
Bry still doesn’t say how much the Skydio X2 will cost, or what we can expect from future consumer drones. (Does the X2’s newly discovered folding capability mean we can finally get a foldable pocket, bag or messenger follow-me drone? No comment.) It also won’t say if there will be a way to use the Skydio’s new 360-. Situational grade view with a VR or AR headset, only I’m on the right track. For now, that feature is limited to equirectangular projection (see an example below) on the built-in screen of the new Skydio Enterprise Controller or HDMI output.
And no, there will be no way to pair the upcoming Skydio Enterprise Controller, even if you could afford it, with today’s consumer-level Skydio 2. If you want a better consumer grade drone than the Skydio 2 and the offsets that come with its three different control schemes, you just have to wait.
