Skydio launches drone with AI-powered autonomy

San Mateo, Calif.-based drone designer and creator Skydio launched its newest drone, the X10, Wednesday, demonstrating its compact size, advanced cameras and sensors, and AI-powered autonomy. Skydio is marketing the X10 to the defense, energy, public safety, transportation, construction and communications industries. While it does not carry cargo, its uses within the air cargo industry include cargo and airport inspection and security . [caption id="attachment_57138287" align="alignright" width="300"] (Photo/Skydio)[/caption] The 2.11-kilogram drone can start up in 40 seconds, operate on Connect SL and cellular 5G frequencies, hover for 35 minutes with a maximum flight time of 40 minutes, operate in light rain and complete darkness, fly at 45 mph, and fly to a density altitude of 15,000 feet. “The traditional axis of innovation in the drone space has been all about hardware,” Skydio Chief Executive Adam Bry said during the launch. “These are the sensors the drone carries, the form factor, the flight time, and this stuff really does matter. This is an area where companies based in China have done some very impressive things. They’re leveraging the Chinese consumer electronics ecosystem, they’re operating at significant scale, [they] build very integrated, capable systems. “At the same time, a number of Western companies have tried to replicate some of this functionality by essentially piecing together off-the-shelf components,” Bry said. “And there’s been some valiant efforts. But it’s hard … to build a really great product doing this. With our current generation of products, Skydio is kind of somewhere in between. We’ve got more scale, more hardware capability than most of our Western peers, but we haven’t yet been able to go toe-to-toe with everything coming out of the drones in China.” But there is more to drones than hardware, Bry said, highlighting the importance of AI and autonomy. Skydio drones use AI to recognize objects or people, then autonomously follow and film them, he said. The launch featured a video of a mountain biker taken by a Skydio drone. The drone is “using machine learning to map and recognize the world around it,” Bry said. “It knows where the mountain biker is, predicting into the future, replanting hundreds of times a second. This is the kind of thing that would be beyond the piloting capabilities of even the best drone pilots in the world. That same technology foundation has enabled us to automate many of the most important and complex tasks for professional users.” The X10 offers the largest array of software, cameras and sensors in a single platform, according to Bry. Nighttime and detailed operations The X10 offers the following capabilities: High-resolution cameras. The cameras include a 48 megapixel zoom camera capable of reading license plates at 800 feet, a 50-megapixel-wide field of view camera that can detect 0.1 mm cracks in concrete, and a 640x512 Teledyne FLIR Boson+ radiometric thermal camera for measuring temperature differences during inspection missions or finding a missing person in total darkness, according to the company. AI-powered autonomy. The onboard AI operates with computational power and navigation cameras 10 times stronger than the previous generation. NightSense. This new feature enables autonomous flight in zero-light environments. Spatial AI engine. This new feature enables real-time environment mapping and fully automated modeling with 3D scan and onboard modeling. During the launch, Skydio demonstrated the NightSense feature by extinguishing all the light in the auditorium and having the X10 fly across the stage avoiding obstacles, including Bry. The audience could not see the stage but the drone could and Skydio projected what the drone was “seeing.” “This is the first time that any drone will have vision-based navigation obstacle avoidance at night and in the dark,” Skydio Vice President of Autonomy Hayk Martiros said. “It does this by having powerful add-on lighting attachments that go into top and bottom payload bays that provide bright, 360[-degree] illumination for the drone that then allows the cameras to see and use our autonomy system. … We’ve designed a version of these cameras with lenses that can see both visible and infrared light.” Use cases in public infrastructure, safety Bry sat down with three Skydio customers at the launch to discuss use cases. “The Department of Transportation in Kansas has about 10,000 lane miles of road to maintain each year, and we maintain and work with 140 public-use airports,” Bob Brock , director of aviation for the Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT), said at the launch. “We call [Kansas] the air capital of the world. … We build about 73% of the small airplanes in the world there.” KDOT, which uses drones to monitor and maintain infrastructure, operates Skydio drones for safety reasons, Brock said. [caption id="attachment_57138286" align="alignleft" width="300"] (Photo/Skydio)[/caption] “We just changed out all of the drones in Kansas … to Skydio drones because it was a risk management choice,” Brock said. “Is it safer to fly a drone that will keep itself from crashing into things? Yes, that’s a good government choice. Do we send somebody to six months of aviation training or do we buy a drone that will just not crash itself?” Skydio drones are also used to enhance public safety , New York Police Department Chief of Patrol John Chell said at the launch. He said the drones are especially useful in locating people who are missing or dangerous. Skydio showed a live, remote demonstration of an X10 pilot working with police to locate a disturbed individual. The X10 pilot was able to rapidly locate the woman using thermal imaging, then relay to police details of her appearance and that she was armed, by using the drone’s cameras.

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