Skydio Dock for X10 Engineering Q&A | Skydio Ascend '24

Watch Skydio customers engage with the Skydio engineering leaders in a Q&A session and see real-world results from industry and government leaders using aerial robotics.

I'm Brian Richmond, senior director of product management here at Skydio. The keynote presentation just wrapped up here. We hope you had a great time, and we're excited to have you here with us virtually.

All of our r and d teams have been working hard to prepare our products, including many of the prototypes that you saw today for this moment, and we're excited to give you a look under the hood during this session.

We've got two of Skydio's most senior r and d leaders here to answer some of the most common questions we get about this technology.

Do you just wanna go ahead and introduce yourselves?

Sure. I can go first. Good afternoon or good morning, everybody. My name's Alden Jones. I lead customer success and product here at Skydio.

Working on year number five. And one of the things that's great about leading both those teams is I get to spend a lot of time in the field talking to customers, hearing about what's going well and what's not, and then I get to come back to the office and work on those problems. So excited to be here today, and I'll pass it off to Ryan.

Great. My name is Ryan Redding. I'm VP of software engineering here at Skydio, and I just crossed my four year mark here at Skydio.

I've been working in spaces like this for over twenty years now. I started my career, in technology actually after, September eleventh. And I was, doing technology work to support folks that were out there supporting our national security missions.

And, then move into, supporting, enterprises and digitizing physical operations, and then join Skydio here, with everything that you're seeing today.

Great. Thank you. So Ryan Alden and I were watching the chat during the keynote, and We've been aggregating your questions to figure out which areas are going to be the most interesting to you. But as we go along here, please feel free to keep on submitting questions in the chat, and we'll get to as many of them as we can.

And as a reminder, for questions relating to technical specs and things like product data sheets, you'll be able to find those at skydio dot com. For purchasing and sales questions, please email sales at skydio dot com.

But our goal here is to use this time to focus on some of the product details that are not as available to you unless you're here with us now on this virtual event.

So before we jump into product questions, can you both talk a little bit about why you joined Skydio and what drives you now?

I can take that first.

So I started my career in the army, and then moved on to heavy industry like trucking and and critical infrastructure like telco.

And one of the things that I feel very fortunate to have as an experience but was very formative was the feeling of what it means to rely on a piece of technology to keep myself safe, to keep my friends and my team members safe, or for our livelihoods to do our job.

And if you can imagine things like GPS or night vision, a lot of people had to work really hard, to give us those technologies and for me to be able to use them reliably, reliably in the field.

And and our customers are doing really sometimes dangerous and and and always critical work.

And so every morning I think about my past and I wake up and I'm motivated to come deliver the next generation of technology. And and I think that that's drones and and that's why I'm here at Skydio.

Cool. Yeah. I, I love working on stuff that matters.

And, you know, watching the keynote today and, like, thinking about all the stuff that our customers are doing is is super motivating.

And, you know, I also love, the fact that we're able to support our military, at Skydio. And it kind of brings me back to early in my career, when I was, kind of working more in that space. So I'm thrilled to be doing that here. But really the thing that brought me into Skydio, is, is this vision of what can be accomplished with connected fleets of autonomous drones.

And I think we're seeing a lot of that, come to life here, with the product announcements that we have, what's happening out with DFR across cities across the US.

I couldn't be more optimistic about the potential of this.

Super thrilled to be working on Great.

Thanks. So we'll start to move into the product questions now, and the live chat. And again, please, please keep those questions coming.

I thought we'd kick things off, by first talking about the biggest differences between the dock for X10 announced today and the previous Skydio dock for S2 and X2.

Yeah.

Adam talked about this a little bit, and I think the place to start with this is just recognizing that this isn't our first doc. In fact, as I said, I've just been here for about four years. And one of the things that I was excited about was seeing when I first was interviewing Skydio, there were prototype docs being built and tested and evaluated then.

So this has been a technology long in the making. We've been learning about this for a long time. We had our first generation product with Doc for X2, and we've been rolling all of those learnings up into the product.

And so as we've been thinking about what is the greatest dock we could build for X10, there's been kind of three main pillars. We've been focusing on the ruggedization of the product. Reliability is a key feature. Adam talked about that at the keynote. And then having the best connectivity solution possible.

Yeah.

And maybe just to dive into that a little bit more, I don't know if we're gonna have slides in the chat, but you saw a little bit of this in the keynote.

We saw the stress testing that we were doing. And as an example, we have these two really beefy motors that are able to open the dock and break through freezing ice that might be caked in if you're up in Alaska. We have a mega HVAC unit, so when we're flying in Vegas and it's a hundred and twenty degrees, we can keep things rolling. And then other things along connectivity, I mean, we we've spent a lot of time on roofs for the last year getting ready for this.

And, you know, when it's hot and cold, sometimes that's not as much fun. But what is great is now that's those learnings have rolled into the product. And so what you saw with Connect access points is a great example of this. Our original dock had the radios right there in the dock.

And sometimes you might wanna put that dock in a different place than where you wanna have line of sight, to see, the dock and the drone connecting from a point to point radio perspective. And so just a tremendous amount of things like that that we've integrated into this product. And ultimately, all this comes down to the outcomes that our customers are gonna be able to get with that. And and fundamentally, this product offers a tremendous new capability to deliver outcomes that we could not before.

Yeah. You saw, on the slide there some of the stuff that we're doing in the lab in terms of, like, cold chambers, shaking tests. There's a bunch of, like, synthetic testing that we're doing. We can see that here. We're also just doing a tremendous amount of testing, just like the demos that you saw up in the keynote. So we have a permanent installation wind wall that's running essentially full time, running autonomous missions up and down, collecting lots and lots of flight hours. We have folks on the roofs at headquarters flying every day.

But then the other thing is we've actually gotten this product out with customers.

And we talked a little bit about this, in the keynote, but our alpha program has been a hugely important aspect of making sure that we have a product that actually works in the real world. So we've been, you know, out in the heat in Nevada.

We've been up on the rooftops in New York. We've been all around with this product, putting it through its paces in kind of real world scenarios.

And I think that's, like, just super critical and super necessary, to actually having a product that works.

Tunnels in Japan too?

Tunnels in Japan. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. Getting back to reliability. Let's talk a little bit about the actual design, of the dock as well. So the design of the dock has fundamentally changed from, the Dock for X2. So the Dock for X2 had a sliding arm, it had a cradle, and we were leveraging Skydio's great autonomy to do precision landing, into that cradle.

But at the same time it's a bit of a precarious type of design. And so we've taken all of that learning and folded it into what you see now, which is a platform design.

And you can see the results as we're testing landing in wind, landing in wind and rain, landing at night. We want to make sure that that product is designed so it works every time, and that we've put it through our paces so that we can know that's going to work every time for our customers.

Yeah. That's awesome. So there's been a couple of questions coming in. I thought we'd take a quick tangent and answer a couple of those, and then we'll get back to some of the connectivity stuff.

Paul's asking, about mobile dock solutions. So to sort of expand on that question, I think, we should talk a little bit about, can you mount a Skydio dock on a on a moving vehicle, in a dynamic environment?

It's It's a great question, and Alden, you can add in on this. But, the dock is designed to be portable but not mobile. So you can take it and you can move it, say, onto a construction site temporarily, put it there, allow it to do useful work for you. When it's done, pack it up, move it to the next location and do that. But, withstanding the kind of daily jolts that it would get on the back of a vehicle, the dock is not designed for that. So that is not a recommended installation.

I mean, fundamentally, just back to reliability, the shake test that you saw in the slide, that was for us to test that as it's being transported across the country to where you need to install it, that this thing's gonna come out of the box and it's gonna work. So we're trying to think really end to end from the moment that you're talking to your sales rep until five years later when this thing is still operating on your site.

I I and, you know, another, like, aspect on this, we've we've thought a lot about, like, whether that should be a use case that we support with Doc for X10. And certainly would love to continue to hear more about use cases that customers have and ideas.

But I think I want to bring attention to kind of the full suite of capabilities. A lot of the use cases that came up there could also be solved by using a hand launch, X10 and remote operations capabilities, and without needing the complexity of a dock. And so, you know, when we look at kind of the the suite of needs out there, actually having a truly, like, mobile mounted in a in a in a vehicle dock was was not a high priority.

Yeah. Connect Fusion is not just for dock. It's for all of our XTM platforms. Yeah.

Yeah. Maybe we'll we'll get back to that. So we're talking about reliability, ruggedness. We'll go a little deeper maybe on the on the connectivity bit now. We talked about fusion today, the the seamless switching between point to point and cellular. Maybe we can talk a little bit about when you might be using the Connect access points versus when you might use cellular and and what kind of actual real world performance you might expect from those.

I I can maybe start off. So back to for the intro there where we were talking about, we just wanna build systems that work for customers. We know that our customers are are really advanced, but in order to scale this, we believe that fundamentally things just have to get simpler. And so the core premise around Connect Fusion is that it just works and you don't have to think about it. And so the idea that you're able to switch between multiple different and redundant different types of communication paths is really critical to the overall vision.

Yeah.

And I think a key thing that's important about the access points and the reason that we created the access points is we just have a wide variety of customers doing different use cases that need optionality.

So with our current generation products, you have a controller and the radio and the antenna are baked into the controller. And with the dock, the radio was baked into the dock. And so you had to kind of choose, do we need to be in the best position for me or do we need to be in the best position for the mission? Where's the best position for the dock versus where's the best position for the antennas?

And so access points give us that optionality to be able to place the radio in the place where it's going to be best for the mission while allowing the person or the dock to be in the best place for it.

So Adam talked a bit about this. We can see some examples of use cases here. I think on the battlefield, there's a desire to be undercover, be in protected location as the operator, but have your radio out in the place where it's got the best visibility. So that's a pretty key use case, but you can see that coming back in for, like, law enforcement, you know, even just being able to be in a hot day in the in the comfort of your air conditioned truck. Yeah. That gives you a lot of flexibility. And then, of course, for dock operations, having having ideal placement for for antennas and radios is super critical.

I think part of the thing that enables access points too, and we saw this a little bit in the demo, is Skydio's autonomy. I've been out flying distro lines with a customer. I won't say who. And we were out there for a few days in in North Carolina.

And, yeah, it's we all wanted to sit in the truck. It was hot. It was sticky. But you you can't do that unless you fundamentally trust the system not to crash into things.

And that's something that is very unique to Skydio that, these two technologies combine and allow a different kind of outcome than we think any other system on the planet.

So the other thing about, the access points, another dimension of flexibility is the antennas.

So again with the previous dock and controller, we had fixed antennas, in there. With the access point, we have standard antenna connectors, so that we have optionality for choosing the right antennas for the mission.

So, for example, you know, in a dock, deployment, you may want to have, you know, omni antennas that provide you three sixty degree coverage for an area. But if you're on the battlefield, for example, you know you're flying in a certain direction and you might want to use directional antennas to maximize your your range, in that. And so access points also provide flexibility for, improving range and improving kind of operational coverage depending on what you're trying to accomplish.

Maybe just a preemptive question too.

And those two examples of directional antennas on the battlefield and Omni antennas for dock, those are initial launch antennas, and then we'll continue to build from there.

And so, you know, maybe getting back to you, you asked about performance.

The, I think fusion is a super important dimension to this, and Adam talked about this. So especially in urban environments, these are interference heavy environments.

And so when we're testing an ideal rural environment and you have good line of sight and not all interference, you're gonna get lots of range. But in these urban environments, you're gonna have that reduced.

And so this idea of being able to leverage the ubiquitous nature of cellular but have coverage area and having the system, like, really, like, manage that for you so that the system just works, is is is super important. And, you know, the testing that we've seen has shown that, I imagine there's gonna be, lots of questions on, like, cellular. We're working heavily with T Mobile right now. We've seen great results in a lot of occasions, but there's areas where, it's it's it's not as good. But I think when we can start pairing these technologies together to give optionality, we give lots of ways to actually, you know, set up the system to accomplish the mission.

Yeah. Great. The combinatory effect of all these technologies, I think, is the story of SkyView. Right? You vision plus GPS, cellular plus point to point radio, and we're seeing this across the industry. Combining technologies ultimately allows you to achieve results instead of just relying on a single one.

Great. Thank you. I'll, I'll I'll hit on a couple, there's been a couple follow-up questions around mobile dock, and I'll just hit on those to say that, disassembly of the dock is required for transport. Yeah. Once you are on scene, you can very quickly reassemble and deploy.

Should we maybe just talk a little bit about, like, the portability of it and, like Yeah.

So so dock breaks down into three different pieces. We we've been doing this a lot in our in our alpha testing.

Also, dock come The three different pieces.

The the roof comes off.

Yep. Roof comes off.

Body comes off the legs.

And the stand.

And then it's a it supports a two person lift.

Two person lift. We're doing this today quite frequently in our early access program.

Also important, you know, when you when you do purchase the dock platform, all of our deployment services come with that. And that includes physically helping you get the dock in a position, helping you figure out what kind of infrastructure you're gonna want to go with that. Some people are looking for more resiliency and and different kinds of connectivity options in really remote areas, and some people are trying to put docks like we're talking about with DFR on top of really tall buildings. And there's different paths that you need to take to do that. No matter what happens, part of what you get in the deployment service is Skydio deployment engineers on-site with you, helping you make sure that you're we will achieve the results that you need and that we're telling you in advance the correct connectivity options that work in your area of operations.

This is another aspect that I think has been informed by, you know, having gone through this a few times. And we actually spent a lot of time during the design phase making sure that the dock could be transported by a dolly comfortably by one person, make sure that we had the weight distribution in such a way so we had portability there, making sure that the dimensions were such that you could fit through a standard door. So there's been a lot of thought in terms of the actual logistics of, like, running these things into the design.

I think I think we saw a little quick GIF. Maybe nobody saw it in the keynote, but of a few of us dragging a early prototype up a really steep set of stairs in a relatively cold slippery environment. And we know that those kinds of things are gonna have to happen. We want to think about every possible range of options for where deployment needs to happen, and we built the system to accommodate that.

I'm gonna I'm gonna go ahead and have us change gears a little bit, talk about another popular question here.

Folks on the chat are wondering what Skydio dock costs. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. I mean, at a high level, so there's different configurations, especially when you get into the radios and attachments that you're gonna want for your drone. But you should essentially budget around fifty thousand dollars for the hardware. But I think really zoom out of that, of that way of thinking.

Doc overall and how Skydio wants to work with our customers is about delivering solutions.

And so when I think about how you're going to leverage dock, it's not just, hey, can I buy this piece of hardware? It's how are we gonna have the regulatory framework to support the operation that you want? How are we gonna deploy this correctly? How are we gonna maintain this?

All of those things, that full end to end picture is how Skydio is thinking about Doc. What I would say is you should probably budget around fifty thousand dollars a year total. And we think about this as a five year program.

And that full end to end solution is how we like to engage with our customers, and we think ultimately that's the right way to engage. This is not something that you go to Best Buy and buy. This is something that you want a partner shoulder to shoulder with you in the field, working through the nuances of your operation so that you can get the outcomes that you need.

I I think this is super critical in that, you know, we have a cool piece of hardware up here. Yep. You know, it's got some shiny lights on it. But at the end of the day, like, setting up a program, and, like, what's happening with DFR?

Like, we're just on the bleeding edge. The industry is on the bleeding edge of setting this up. And, you know, Adam highlighted this in the keynote. There's a lot of moving parts to bringing together.

And we're trying to bring together as much of the technology solution as we can to be a highly integrated solution.

But we also want to be partners in standing up these programs, bringing in best practices, bringing in knowledge from across the industry, and really being a partner for you and being successful in setting up these programs. So it's less about buying the hardware and more about how do we set up a successful program.

And getting back to why I joined Skydio, you know, as an engineer and an engineering leader, that's the other thing that I love about this is we're out there with our customers all the time. I mean, I love going on-site. I love having the engineers go on-site, see what's going on. We've done ride alongs with, like, police departments, understand the day to day, and fold that, like, learning back into our development process.

And I think that's something that's really unique that Skydio brings to the table.

And I'm really proud of it. So, I'm I just wanted to call that out.

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the best example of that, it's an extreme example, is that we've all been to Ukraine. We did that because it felt disingenuous to try and solve or help solve the problems that they're facing without being there ourselves.

One other thing I'll say is, you know, on the customer success side, myself and a lot of the folks on the team, we built drone programs before we came to Skydio. I built a program that did about thirty thousand flights a year. And I'm really proud of that, but I think, ultimately, when we're thinking about this kind of disruptive and big change technology, change management in your organization is is a real thing that we want to help you with. And all the documentation and regulatory services and all the services that we're talking about ultimately are in the service of helping you conduct change management in your organization, because we know that we are part of an existing ecosystem.

Defense was defending us before we got here. Law enforcement was protecting us before we got here.

You know, utilities were keeping the lights on before we got here. And all of those use cases or or industries we're doing that with a suite of technology before we got here. And now that we're here, we know that we need to plug in to that existing ecosystem because getting the data where you need it in your system of record is not just a technology solution. It's it's a programmatic solution, and we wanna help you with that change.

Change. I'll, shift us to another category of question.

Quite a few of these were coming in towards the beginning as well as this morning's keynote.

When will the dock begin shipping?

When can folks expect it in the wild?

Yeah. So I think we talked about this a little bit in the keynote, but maybe to get in a few more details. So, early next year, but for us, we we plan on putting our first, early access next gen dock down in January.

The early access program is already booked up, so we're gonna be cranking hard to get those things in the field, confirming everything that we've talked about here. And then orders that are coming in today should be shipping, in summer, and we're we're excited to get after it.

Great. There's been a lot of, strong international interest in the chat as well. I thought we should address that.

When will we be shipping internationally and or where? How do we think about that?

Yep. So maybe just to start, like, with the the the basics on this, and you can add on. But to start, we're gonna be focusing on US and Japan as our primary markets, and, we're gonna be spending our energies there. We absolutely see this as a global product, and see the opportunity, for it having impact across the world. So that is something that's high on our radar, and we're gonna be moving aggressively, to supporting, but we're gonna make sure we land it, super well here in the US, for our US customers and Japan customers first.

Yeah. I I nothing to add.

Great.

There's been maybe we'll shift over and talk about, DFR command a little bit. A specific question that has come in, I think I think maybe there's some follow-up based on what folks saw this morning, in the end to end demo.

Can you fly more than one drone, at the same time? And what are the why might you want to do that?

Cool.

It's a great question. Well, we showed it here live on stage Yeah. That, that multiple drones, are supported. And, you know, I think if you just think about programs at scale, like, that is an inevitability.

You know, we're kind of moving, kind of looking, backwards from a typical deployment where one person hands on joysticks in the field, like flying a drone. And especially as the technology and the regulatory landscape changes, that, you know, you're gonna have centralized command, and operators that are basically in control of, like, multiple drones doing useful things. And the autonomous nature of the drones are really what enables that. Yep.

And certainly, there's software integrations.

Team has put a tremendous amount of work, into the experience that you saw here on stage. And that's actually something that is quite complicated that just kind of looks seamless.

So I think we can get a lot more into, like, what are the important aspects of something like DFR command in terms of, like, reducing cognitive load, helping people focus on the thing that matters. But the TLDR is, we will support flying multiple drones.

Maybe maybe one thing to add on there, and this goes back to how much we enjoy getting shoulder to shoulder with our customers. I mean, we some some of the folks in the team were UAS military operators before coming to Skydio, and there's a there's a, concept there called on station transfer, which we think, just to go deep real quick into DFR for a moment, is absolutely applicable for DFR. We saw in the demo here, you know, Deepu was looking at at the suspect. There was another incident happening in this case, so he wanted to dispatch a drone.

But we also know that we have customers who are doing, you know, barricaded subjects, and they might be flying for hours. Right? The negotiator, it it might take time to get through that stuff. And so you can imagine a world where we know that batteries or fuel are not infinite.

So whether you have a gas powered engine or not, and you don't wanna lose situational awareness. The idea of returning home, losing awareness, sending something back. So the workflow end to end is so important to us. And going deep for something like on station transfer for the DFR, the platform that you saw today allows and enables those kinds of workflows.

And I think we can think about that across all of our customer segments.

Like, that's the kind of depth that we wanna get into and we probably shouldn't talk about it here, but we'll get it'll get down into the weeds of just what's the easiest way for you to even move the mouse the least amount possible to move the button.

Yeah. You know, I guess maybe just to kind of riff off of DFR command, you know, I think, you know, the importance of it goes well beyond just the, like, the operation of drones.

So making we kind of got right into it on stage here, but this idea of data that's coming in from these systems of record, coming right into the operating screen of folks that are in these command centers, and being able to seamlessly dispatch drones, dispatch resources, to get to incidents that matter quickly is super critical. And, like, that requires tight integration with all of these systems. And I think that's just a fundamentally important capability. And then, you know, flying the drone is important, but we're not flying drones to fly drones. We're flying drones to get information to be able to make decisions.

So things like having a ready link that you can distribute around to the people that matter so that the folks that are making decisions about the resources to deploy, about, like, the type of force to use, about how to engage have that information.

That's a huge part of, of the value proposition of DFR command. And then, you know, the end of it here, in the resolve phase is, like, capturing all that data, in a way that you can, you know, store it for processing, for private entry purposes, or establish, community transparency.

This is the full picture of what needs to happen to be successful.

And, you know, that's that's really what DFR Command is all about.

Yeah. There are a couple, a couple specific questions, which which I think we've answered, but maybe not, super directly, which I'll take on here around battery swapping and charge times. So I think we just spoke about on station relief, and I think that that is key here. That is our priority right now to have the most seamless, on station relief sort of automated workflows as possible such that there are no gaps in coverage at all. And that also allows us to build sort of the ultimate and overall dock product reliability.

So that's that's how we think about that.

We also I mean, part of our learnings in working through x two doc, we've built a tool. Part of the process when we're working with a public safety customer is we will ingest all of the calls for service data that you have historically, And we'll map where we think we can deliver, the best outcomes for you based on your priorities. If time to respond is a priority versus just wide area coverage, I mean, this is part of the process. And to Ryan's point, you know, we were in we're entering this ecosystem.

We're I think we're doing a good job. We've been here, but it's been around for a long time. And so agencies have, you know, decades of call for service data. And that that level of detail, I think, allows us to go and and plan for the right kind of redundancy or on station transfer or multiple simultaneous operations that you want for the opt tempo or the, you know, the busyness of of of your agency.

So the the other thing I wanna, like, drive home a bit here as well is we're talking about docks and they're gonna be, you know, shipping you know, new order shipping, you know, mid next year and second half of next year. But the software stack that we're talking about now are available today.

Yeah.

And folks that you know, depending it it this combination of, like, both having operational flexibility, but also being able to get started today and build up the the operational rhythms that are going to be, you know, needed for when a dot comes. And we're seeing folks doing this with a patrol led model. Yep. So having x tens in in patrol cars on demand, being able to put them down, have a remote operator take over, use the same exact software stack to then provide remote assistance to somebody on the ground.

We're seeing, rooftop DFR with, like, crew led base. So, like, without a dock, but a human doing operations there, swapping batteries, like, helping support that. And then even, like, pop up DFR commands. You know?

If there's, like, something, captain Buster talked about Oklahoma City Fair. Yep. There's, like, an event or something that's happening there, being able to put up a small command mobilely, have docs or have x tens there, remote operators, that are able to, like, provide overwatch and situational awareness. So this stuff is available today.

And you can get started, and it's the exact same software stack that you can get integrated in with your ecosystem, that you can get learn learn about how pilots trained on. And then when the doc is ready, that just slots in seamlessly.

Yeah. For those in the chat that have been asking about how to how to get this now, how to start a trial POC, that is the answer. Sales at skadio dot com, is the best route Absolutely. To to get that rolling. There's also been a couple questions about, some of the awesome capabilities shown as part of DFR command, and folks are wondering if they'll be able to get those things without DFR command, things like map overlays, some of the multi drone capability, things like that. Will that be available outside of DFR command?

Yeah. I mean, just generally to zoom out a little bit, DFR Command is built on the overall Skydio platform and architecture, and it's tailor made and specific, like Ryan mentioned, with ready, respond, resolve kinds of workflows to make that seamless for specific customers in the public safety world who need to go do things. But that doesn't mean that the underlying technologies aren't being delivered and aren't super valued to the rest of our customer base. So maybe short answer is yes. We I don't know how much specifics we wanna get into.

Yeah. I mean, the the technologies I the the thing I would say is the technologies are there and are applicable across a wide variety of use cases. You know, as that makes sense, we're gonna make those technologies available to all use cases. DFR Command is a specific instantiation of this that is optimized for solving the DFR and public safety use case.

But, you know, the same underlying technology may apply across industries. And, we'll certainly be bringing those as it makes sense.

Great.

Let's shift gears, a little bit again. Maybe we'll maybe we'll go back just a little bit to some of the services discussion.

There's been a couple questions about that, and if folks will be able to leverage third party maintenance or deployment services, to to go along with our dock.

Yeah. I I can take that. So, Ryan mentioned this before. We believe that dock is a global platform, and we're starting with the US and Japan, but but we know that this will be, a tool that will be used worldwide.

And we also know that, aid or excuse me, organizations such as partners know how to operate inside of their communities and their regions oftentimes better than anybody somebody far away can.

So just to say it out loud, I mean, we absolutely plan to and are in the process of certifying third parties to work helping us install and maintain docs, and that's an ecosystem that we're just really hungry to continue to grow.

Part of the reason that we've been doing these early access programs is, you know, as you build a program and start to understand the technology and all of its nuances, it's really important when you're working with partners to be able to give really clear specific work instructions.

I've dealt with this a little bit in in my prior life. You know, if I was having a third party engine maintainer go work on a truck, if you can't explain exactly what needs to happen and have that documented and and provide certifications so that the right people are gonna gonna come and the end customer is gonna get what they need, then that's really challenging. And so a lot of the work that we're doing now is building those programs, but we are super enthusiastic about all kinds of partners coming with us on this journey, and it's something that we're already working on today.

Great. Thank you.

Let's jump around yet again here. Maybe we can talk a little bit about, another big announcement today, which was, the dock for x ten d.

Maybe we can we've got a visual. Maybe we can pull that up and just talk a little bit about what that means, what the implications are Yeah. What the benefits might be.

So I I think this is, super exciting. We've been, you know, working on this technology with the previous generation. And, you know, as I mentioned, it's a fundamentally connected technology.

And because of that and the nature of the software architecture that supports that, it's kind of been, you know, something that's, you know, not really applicable or, like, unusable by our our government customers or government partners that are working in kind of these critical areas that have high, high security needs, and are high security applications.

And so this is allowing us to bring this technology to those those agencies and those use cases.

And we've designed the software so that you can really bring that regardless of what you're doing, if you have air gapped networks, you can bring that software behind the air gap. If you're working on high side networks, you can do that for things like, you know, like SIPR or whatever your agency network is. And, and we have the flexibility to support a wide variety. I mean, the base security, I think, is a great example. There's lots of other, you know, critical infrastructure, types of applications out there that are high security, that really demand this type of architecture.

So I think this is I think this is super important. I think, you know, this is also probably the only system in the world that's gonna be able to address those types of use cases. So I think it's I think it's really powerful.

I was hoping we can nerd out about SIPR and Nipper.

I got to It's been a while. But, I ran the Italian s two shop for a little bit when I was a captain.

So I I mean, look, the other thing is not just with dock, but just in general, you know, we already partner with ATAC. We know that delivering this information over tactical networks is just super important. And by definition, those tactical networks are local area architecture.

Yeah. And, you know, this has been part of our, alpha deployments as well. We've been, you know, out there in these types of, like, offline environments, tactical environments, and testing the dock and the software, and and with great success and integrating in with other robotic systems, to provide advanced, like, types of security. And so I I I it's very clear to me that that's the future. And I think this is gonna unlock a lot of really interesting use cases.

Cool. We'll transition to a couple of of hardware, specific questions here.

One question is just is is Skydio dock drone agnostic? Maybe we can talk a little bit about the benefits of a a fully integrated system with the Skydio dock and the Skydio drone.

Yeah.

I I mean, I guess I can start with this a little bit and feel free to chime in.

So, I would say the Skydio dock for x ten has been built for the x ten.

Yeah.

So, currently, they you know, it it supports only, like, that drone. However, the the concept of the dock, is something that is very applicable to, you know, if we, have, you know, other form factors or iterations on the product, that those design elements will still remain highly relevant.

That's an ad.

Great.

There's a couple of earlier questions, about snow and rain. We talked about the IP fifty five rating on stage. We we did a demonstration, in rain.

How do we handle snow?

Well, first off, we we have heaters built into the dock, so we melt snow. That's why I was nerding out about the big motors to crack the ice. That's that's part of the workflow.

You also saw how the the dock opens. There was some thought behind that to sort of dump the snow off the back as as the thing rotates around itself.

So bring on the snow. We're we're excited for snow.

Yeah. Maybe just going a little bit deeper there, because we didn't talk much about this, but, you know, inside the dock, it's basically a full thermal management system. Yeah. And, you know, it's important for being able to, like, operate in extreme weather conditions for things like resiliency to snow, but it's also important for, like, battery and, like, system health management as well. We need to keep that system at the right temperature, whether it's, like, you know, a hundred and ten outside Yep. Or, like, you know, below zero outside.

And so the system has that all fully integrated to keep the keep the drone up and running as optimal as possible.

I I mean, this is a little bit of a dovetail, but one of the things that Ryan and I are and our teams are working on, which we're pretty excited about, is the full enterprise management of these platforms at scale across your enterprise.

So you can imagine in a world where you have all these connected devices, they're sitting inside of connected docs, you know the health status of those things.

There are some customers that we have, you know, they they have a national footprint. So it would not be crazy on a given day. If anybody's lived in New England, you know, sometimes Thanksgiving it's zero and sometimes it's seventy degrees, but you can imagine a world where you have on the same day a platform that's in a hundred degree weather and zero degree weather because that's the scale of your footprint as an organization. And we wanna be able to show you the health status of those things so that you can manage your fleet however you need to accomplish your mission.

You know, we haven't, like, got into this much, but maybe just a quick aside on, you know, redundancy and and and reliability and how we're thinking about deployments. So, we're seeing a lot of need, and we are designing, the system around the ability to deploy them in in in groups, and we call those groups of docs a hive.

So the idea that, you know, you have multiple redundant systems, you have multiple systems in parallel, that can be coordinating to respond to, events, and that they are deconflicting with each other in intelligent ways. And so we know we're thinking about different, like, deployment models. That is a that is a fundamental concept that that we are building around and we recommend, deployment strategies around.

Yeah. And maybe maybe we, we can just jump back a little bit to Skydio Connect access points. There's been a couple more questions about that. Sure.

Couple questions about, is there a radio in the dock itself, and how does that work in conjunction with the the access points?

I could take that.

So there is a radio in the dock itself. So if you just set up a dock, with no connect access point, it can operate, within a limited range. You'll get the best range, the optimum range, by having external access point with a with a good mounting location, but will have a radio.

And then, you know, also even without an access point, if you have strong cellular coverage, you can operate that system completely off of cellular, using the local radio. That local radio is also there for supporting media offload.

So when the system, like, lands, starts charging, then it's, like, connected to the local dock radio for doing media offload, and that link is optimized for that high speed transfer.

And then you don't have to worry about anything beyond that. As, you know, we're taking off, we're gonna transition, the drone from the local radio that's on the dock to either an access point or cellular, and all that's gonna be seamless.

Maybe just to talk about that a little bit more. We haven't dove into the details on backhaul, but just to say it upfront, you know, we're today, we've tested, and we will support backhaul in multiple different configurations. We have folks who are doing backhaul only through Starlink, so satellite only. We have folks using cellular.

We have folks using both. There are solutions out there to bond satellite or cellular. And, of course, if you if you have access to Ethernet, we we love plugging in and going hard line as well. So all those different options are there, and that's to afford the ability to deploy in more austere or more urban environments, whatever is gonna work best for your use case.

Great.

Question just came in, about, options for backup power. So thinking again about very isolated environments. Yep. Redundancy is is critically important. We've talked about it from a connectivity standpoint.

Does Skydio dock support or have built in backup power?

Yeah. So so it does. Actually, if if you haven't checked out, Caltrans' LinkedIn page, they have some some great media of what they've done over there in early access, and I highly recommend it. We're also gonna be working with partners to to who can provide battery backup, solar.

If, you know, if you wanna run them on a generator, you can. All those things, I think, depending on the type of mission that you're kinda trying to complete, should be part of the consideration and something that the Skydio team will be working with you on as you go through the process.

Great. We'll do probably two more here, as we wind down.

First, there are a couple of questions about sort of built in analysis tools versus reliance and integration on third parties. So maybe maybe a quick hit on on sort of Skydio Extend and and how that sort of unlocks broader end to end workflows.

Yeah. Absolutely.

So I would say that the first, like, baseline is that, you know, our software system is built on top of of an API layer. So you can go on our website today. You can go and get the developer documentation.

And, you know, if you have the resources or the interest, you can start building integrations against that API today.

We've also added on, a capability called Skydio Extend, which is kind of an umbrella over to the API, which makes it very easy, for, us to integrate with third party platforms through an integration system that's on top so that you don't need to have your own development resources, development team to leverage those APIs. We also have services that go along with that.

And there's just such a wide variety of different tools out there in terms of analysis capabilities for imagery and the data that's coming in. So for our customers to take advantage of that, these systems need to be integrated with those. You can actually go on to the, Skydio Cloud today. There's an integrations tab. You can see a library of all the things, that we support today, out of the box.

Certainly using these APIs and the platform that I've discussed, it's, it's possible to to add more. We'd love to hear what, what integrations folks are most excited about. So please, you know, you can go in there. You can click.

You can request. You can type in your feedback. It'll come in directly to us. And, yeah, excited to hear more from folks.

Cool.

And then the last one here is a bit a bit of a go back on an earlier conversation we had, but, there's an ask about if we have built in diagnostic system checks so folks know, you know, the health of their system and and how to manage them and and maybe what Yeah.

What things can be addressed per So maybe twofold is, on this.

And, you know, Alden, if you you can, bookend my my comment here. So there's a ton of system health checks that go into both the drone operation and the dock operation.

And you can see some of those as, as the drone's being launched and it's doing some of its checks, and it is showing some of that on screen.

And, and so all of that's gonna be happening, but, you know, we've been just talking about this. You know, one of the things that we need to do, we are going to be, working on is also exposing more of that to our customers for helping, like, maintain and manage the system. So that's gonna be a big part of of kind of where we're taking the platform as well.

So it's not just about, like, Skydio doing it all, but also exposing the data to help the the operators, the program managers of these systems understand the health of their fleet, and I think that's also important. I know we're gonna run out of time here, but just for the maintenance story long term of these things.

So These these docs break down into major component modules. We've intentionally built sensing capabilities for each of those major modules. And whether you wanna do the maintenance yourself or, one of our partners is or we are, overall, this a a lot of what a dock does is reduce truck rolls. And so we wanna reduce truck rolls in the full ecosystem, not just in the in the critical missions. And so knowing that you're gonna go out and fix whatever parts you need to the right time, the first time, all that is is part of of how we're thinking about sensing and and being able to check the health of the system.

We could go on for another fifteen minutes on this. I'm sure.

We probably I'll, kinda my baby.

I'll, unfortunately yeah. Unfortunately, I have to wrap this up here, but thanks, thanks to you both so much, for doing this.

I'd like to remind everybody, to check out skydio dot com for all of the detailed product information, data sheets, specifications for the dock, remote ops, DFR command, and x ten, of course. For purchasing and sales questions, please contact us contact us directly at sales at skydio dot com. And we very much look forward to having you all at the rest of our virtual events over the next two days. And lastly, for those of you who did submit questions live in the chat that we were not able to directly address, we do plan to follow-up with you directly. So thank you all for joining us.

Thanks, Brian. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.