Skydio Dock for X10 Keynote Presentation | Skydio Ascend '24

Witness the Skydio Ascend Keynote presentation and be the first to discover new Skydio products and updates. Watch customers engage with Skydio engineering leaders in a Q&A session and see real-world results from industry and government leaders using aerial robotics.

Please welcome Skydio CEO and cofounder Adam Bry.

This is such a special thing we all get to be a part of.

We build some of the most advanced technology in the world, and we deploy it in service of the people who protect our security and help to keep our civilization running.

We make flying robots that give you superpowers, help people do their jobs better, help to keep us all safe.

Now we are a hardcore technology company through and through, and we're here today to announce some incredibly exciting new technology products.

But the longer we do this and the more advanced our technology becomes, the more that I've come to appreciate that it's really all about the people.

And this group of people in the room here today, all of you, is the most special group of people in the world to me. Our visionary customers coming together with our incredible team and all of us working to collaboratively build this incredible future together. Now, we have hundreds of folks in the room here today. We've got ten thousand more joining remotely. Thank you all so much for joining us.

Now we all met here a year ago with a big question.

Could the autonomy technology that Skydio is known for come together with best in class hardware to deliver a complete solution for the next chapter of drones and enterprise?

And we had an answer to that question with Skydio X10.

Now Skydio X10 delivered a combination of autonomy, sensing, modularity and versatility that had never existed before in a single platform, let alone a medium class drone that could fit in a backpack and get in the air in less than thirty seconds.

But as I said at the time, what really mattered is what happened next, what you all did with it.

And the demand and reception for X10 has been stunning even to us. Now the metrics tell the story.

So here we're going to look at usage. This is flights per week from the date of first customer shipment.

We'll start by looking at Skydio two and X2 combined. These are both great products. They did amazing stuff out there. We're not showing the y axis, but trust me, this is a lot of flying.

Now let's look at X10.

Completely blows it out of the water. At its one year anniversary, X10 will be our highest usage product ever by a factor of five x.

And across the entire Skydio customer fleet actually, this is just our online systems, so this excludes the government systems, some of our biggest customers just the online systems will do two hundred and fifty thousand plus flights this year.

What does that really mean? What does two hundred and fifty thousand flights mean?

Well, two hundred and fifty thousand flights means two hundred and fifty thousand stories.

And I actually think the best way to understand this is not looking at the aggregate statistics, it's looking at the specifics. And so I want to share some of those stories with you here today.

Let's get into the details. The details really matter. Let's go to Orlando, Florida earlier this year.

Officers from Orange County Sheriff's Office were called out to a potentially violent individual on the eighteenth floor of this high rise hotel. Let's see what happened.

Sheriff's office.

Eunice is fine for the twenty five. The room is gonna be on the eighteenth floor. They were freezing to open the door, and no personal contact has been made. They're saying it's extremely violent, and it's registered to one adult in the room.

Yes, sir. We do have a drone operation out here. Do you wanna see if you can throw that up there so we can get eyes in on that window? Yeah. Ten four.

There it is. It's that one. It's that window right there. Just signal fourteen. I have eyes on him with the drone outside. He's got, like, a shower rod.

Just tried to barricade that now.

I can try to move stuff over.

And there's literally, like, yellow. I think that's your fast pass. So it looks like that they're gonna resistance.

And then the barricade is past the front door.

We're not sure if he's trying to start, like, something on fire in there, so we'll start working on breaching.

Alright. Hit hard.

Hard.

So the most critical moment in that video is actually easy to miss. From the ground, it's impossible to see what's happening in that room, and when the officers are outside the door, they obviously they actually couldn't see inside either. But if you notice, they popped up a phone. On that phone, they had a livestream from the drone. So those officers outside the door knew exactly what was happening in the room, and they knew the exact moment that person became a danger, not only themselves, but everybody else in that building when they were thinking about starting a fire. The officers did phenomenal work. They coordinated a response.

They entered the room. They kept everybody safer. This is the kind of thing that's only possible with an autonomous drone that can get up there, fly close to the building, and get that kind of real time information.

Incredible work by Orange County Sheriff's Office.

Now to help set the stage for this next story, I wanna share a number with you.

It's estimated that power outages in the US cost upwards of fifty billion dollars a year. That's why our energy utility customers work so hard to keep the power on because they know that in the best case, a power outage is just an inconvenience. In the worst case, it leaves critical services unavailable.

And oftentimes, power outages are caused by serious disasters when equipment fails.

So I want to go to a substation in the US earlier this year where one of our customers was doing a routine inspection with a drone. So first of all, they've got this aerial vantage point. So they're up in the air. They're seeing these bushings on a switch that you couldn't see from the ground. And in the radiometric thermal camera, you can see that two of those bushings are actually about sixty degrees hotter than the baseline, the one on the right, and this is indicative of a serious issue. This is the kind of thing that a drone makes easy to detect, and it's the kind of thing that easily prevents a critical failure.

Now let's go to Bethel, Alaska.

Now for many of you, Bethel probably needs no introduction, but for those unfamiliar, Bethel is a small remote town in northern Alaska, far away from any critical services, and they have some pretty extreme weather in Bethel. So let's see what they were able to do with the x ten.

Everybody was on a Teams call and see me live as I was flying around. Back when we had Murdoch, it took a few weeks for us to get any funding. It took a while for images and for the media to actually relay all the incident and all, you know, the emergency to the people who make the decision to declare emergency or not, such as Mike Dunleavy in the governor's office. And with this circumstance, we were able to show him right now the day of the flooding.

So he was able to make decisions within a day of of the incident versus a week, a week and a half when we had Murdoch. Time is is of essence. You know, the longer we take, the more people can be hurt. The less people, they don't get food.

They don't get shelter. They don't get what they need to restart their lives.

So you heard him say it there. The x ten transformed what would be weeks or days of response time down to minutes and hours, and there's two hundred and fifty thousand other stories out there like this. X10 is seeing high usage in incredibly high stakes scenarios with incredible impact.

We also know that everything's not perfect out there, and earlier this summer, we started hearing reports like this from our customers, where they did a software update and some important things got significantly worse. And I want to use the opportunity here to share a little bit about what happened.

So here, we're looking at a chart of wireless system performance. On the x axis, we have range, so the further away you get, the weaker the signal becomes. And on the y axis, we have the video quality. And in baseline, we would expect the performance to look something like this.

Unfortunately, after our May software update, it looked like this.

We introduced some regressions that caused serious pain out there in the field for many of you. This is something that we're ultimately responsible for as a company that I'm responsible for as the CEO of Skydio.

Now fortunately, our team was able to figure out what went wrong.

They wrote some code. We were able to fix it. In August, we got back a little bit beyond our baseline performance, but the fact that we went backwards at all is completely unacceptable.

So what are we doing going forward?

Well, the most obvious thing, the most important thing, is we are doubling down on testing in our customers' environments. We're scaling up our testing infrastructure, we're getting out there in the field more, and we're also doing a lot of user acceptance testing with our biggest customers so that we can trial new software before we roll it out to the entire fleet.

On top of that, we're really investing in automated test infrastructure. So what we're looking at here is an anechoic chamber, so this is a wireless test infrastructure.

We use this very heavily for development, so it blocks out all external radiation. It enables you to simulate a perfectly clean, infinite environment so you can do repeatable wireless tests. We're now doing heavy automated testing in here as well. So before every software release, we can run a regression suite, make sure that everything is performing as it should, and we're actually investing in automated testing across all of our systems. So we have a simulator, we run hundreds of thousands of simulation flights, and now we're starting to extend this to the real world. So as we're developing software, an engineer can actually make a change, push that code to a vehicle, have that vehicle run an automated flight test in real time. This enables us to move faster while maintaining the integrity and reliability of the system.

But even with all this work, connectivity is still a pain point for drone operations. We know this. And if we take a step back and kind of think about the history of connectivity in drones, basically, everything has been based on these point to point links. And, you know, the system might advertise that it gets ten kilometers range.

It's going to cover everything you need to fly. It's great. Now in practice, in many environments, that comes down quite a bit. You know, when you get into an urban environment, there's other sources of interference, and you might go from ten kilometers down to just a few hundred meters.

And the story is actually even more challenged than that because there's occlusions and other things that get in the way that block the point to point wireless signal.

Now, in a one to one manual drone world, this actually isn't that big of a deal because you don't want to fly anywhere that the pilot can't see the drone anyways. So there's kind of a natural pairing between point to point wireless link and manual drone world, and these things kind of work nicely together, but our vision is much bigger than that. We want to put drones everywhere they can be useful. We want them to be able to do useful work across the city, and we think this requires some fundamentally new paradigms in connectivity.

So step one for us is introducing Skydio access points. So this enables you to get physical separation between the operator and the controller and where that wireless signal is coming from. Now, why does this matter? It's useful in almost every scenario.

So on the battlefield, it means that you can have a soldier under cover, and they can place that radio up to three hundred feet away. Could be on top of a structure, so it's got better coverage. They're safely flying the drone from from under cover. The radio's up where it's gonna get great range.

Super powerful. In a public safety context, you could put it on the roof of a police car, so you can be sitting inside the car flying the drone. It's connected over Ethernet. The radio is where it needs to be. You can even put it up on top of the building.

Now step two, which we're really excited about, is Skydio Connect Fusion. So Skydio Connect Fusion seamlessly blends the point to point link from either the controller or the access point to five gs infrastructure. So the drone can have both links active at the same time. It can automatically detect which one is healthiest, which one is best, and it can dynamically switch between them as it needs to to accomplish the missions. You get the benefits of both links. So this is a product that's in late stage development now.

We've done testing in a lot of real world environments, so this is data from a dense, dense urban area where we did systematic suites to evaluate the coverage of both the point to point link and the LTE link. We're getting great results.

Did this in our local big city in San Francisco as well. So this is technology that we'll be rolling out towards the end of this year, early next year. The beginnings of this are already available now. You can dynamically switch manually between five gs and the point to point link.

We're very excited about this, and we're really excited to be working with T Mobile to bring a lot of this to life. You know, putting a drone on five gs is not as simple as just activating a SIM card. There's a lot of work that goes on under the hood. These are different from phones.

They operate at altitude. They fly fast. They can see multiple towers at once. So there's a lot of hard tuning that goes into making this system work.

And today, we're even more excited to be announcing wireless priority service on T Mobile for our public safety customers. So this means that you're gonna be able to get priority access so that the traffic for the drone will be prioritized when there's congestion so you can respond to critical incidents.

So we're headed towards this vision where we can do useful work across the city. We're excited to announce another major milestone towards that today as well. So NYPD got the nation's first beyond visual line of sight waiver with no visual work to do flights across the city. This is really a landmark achievement that enables them to take a big step forward towards this DFR and smart city future.

And this is really just one of many data points that we're seeing across the country. We've gotten forty plus regulatory approvals. Twenty five of those don't require a visual observer, and this has enabled our customers to fly at over one thousand sites across the country.

So let's do a little bit of quick review.

We've got a great drone in X10 with great sensors, advanced autonomy.

We've got Kinect Fusion to get that drone connected everywhere you want it to be doing useful work.

And we're breaking through the bb loss barrier all over the country.

There's still a little problem with this picture though. You still need a person there to fly the X10. They've got to charge the batteries, they've got to be on the ground, they've got to launch it, they've got to land it. In many ways, this person kind of works for the drone.

That's not the way it should be. You should have drones out there all the time doing useful work for you. They should be responding to incidents, inspecting your infrastructure. All that data should be fed back to where you are, where you need it. The drone should work for you. This is the future we envisioned.

That's why we started Skydio.

That's why we bet on autonomy, and that's why we created the dock for X10.

Alright. Let's see what this product's all about.

For the people with the toughest jobs in the world, having the right information at the right time is the difference between success and failure, between life and death.

And every second counts.

Skydio dock for x ten.

Station docked X ten's where critical work happens.

Get airborne in twenty seconds.

Operate remotely from anywhere in the world and get the data you need to act.

X ten features category leading visual and thermal sensors to capture the details you need with the modularity and versatility for any mission.

You were trespassing on private property.

Dock keeps your drones ready to fly even in the toughest conditions.

Scorching heat, freezing cold, day or night.

Go beyond visual line of sight with built in weather sensors and airspace awareness, plus world leading autonomy with Skydio Pathfinder to confidently get X ten sensors wherever you need them.

And get limitless range with Connect Fusion, seamless switching between point to point and five g connections.

Operate fleets of drones everywhere, all at once with Skydio remote ops. From multi drone operations to planning and scheduling missions for continuous data collection.

For public safety agencies, Skydio DFR command is the ultimate software suite for drone operations.

Respond to incidents with a single click, share live video with ready link, and use augmented reality overlays for precise visual orientation.

Manage your fleet, upload evidence, and build community trust. It's all at your command.

Skydio dock for x ten.

A fully integrated hardware and software solution from the drone to the dock to the cloud to keep our community safe, keep our lights on, and help secure our nation.

All right. So there are there are a lot of products working together to make this happen. You've got the dock. You've got the drone. You've got Connect Fusion.

You've got the remote operation software. And then you've got the integrations to get the data everywhere it needs to go. But all of this is really in service of a very simple goal. All of this is about getting those sensors exactly where you need them in as low a friction way as possible to get the information people need to make better decisions and get better outcomes. And the way that I think about this, Doc for X10 is really the world's best automated data capture platform.

And really, the number one feature you need to make this work and make it valuable is reliability.

So we talked about a year ago we launched X10. Two years ago, we introduced dock for Skydio two and X2. This isn't the first dock we've developed.

And over the last two years, our customers have done over four hundred deployments and our customers have done over seventy thousand flights. This is all over the US and even internationally with our customers and partners in Japan.

And over those two years, we've gotten a ton of real world learnings. We've gotten out into the field. We've seen what it takes to make these things work and deliver value. We've we've dealt with the high taxes in California.

Bad jokes you can blame on the marketing team.

So we've seen what it takes to deploy these systems, to make them useful. We've learned a lot of hard lessons about reliability, and we've rolled all of those lessons into doc for x ten to make it the most robust, the most reliable doc system on the planet. Now, it's one thing to talk about reliability, but we always believe that seeing is different. And so in addition to bringing Doc for X10, we, we brought this thing, which we call the wind wall. So what the heck is the wind wall? This is a piece of infrastructure we developed to stress test the dock. So this thing draws twelve kilowatts.

It can generate winds up to thirty miles an hour. We've done over five thousand flights, docked for X-ten in front of the wind wall to refine and tune the systems. And so we figured we might as well show that to you here live. So, can we get some wind going?

Honestly, I think that looked a little bit too easy.

Maybe we could turn the wind up a little bit.

Little more.

Oh, yeah.

No problem. So what's actually happening there? Well, a lot is happening. So the drone has a physics model.

It knows everything about how it should behave, and it's using that physics model to estimate the exact wind speed. And then it's predicting into the future using that same physics model to figure out exactly what it needs to do to compensate, perfectly hold its position, do a precise landing, and those last few centimeters of error are taken care of by the smart platform. So we know we can deal with wind no problem, but wind isn't the only thing that you're going to have to face out there in the wild. So why don't we, why don't we see if this thing can handle rain?

Can we get some rain here on stage?

Look at that built in rain. So raining on the dock is no problem. The real question is, can we fly in the rain? So X10 is IP55 rated, so it can fly in light to moderate rain.

This is actually beyond light to moderate rain. This is like heavy rain. This is two inches per hour. So this would be a pretty serious rainstorm.

No problem for X10.

But honestly, though, I think the rain by itself also looks a little bit too easy, so maybe we should add in the wind together so we have a real storm going here.

Can we turn the wind back on?

Pretty sweet.

So X10 is using computer vision heavily to make all this work. It's got onboard navigations. It's using its user camera to detect that dock, localize, hone in, and do a precise landing. It's very challenging to do that in the rain because you start to get water on the lenses.

It's even more challenging to do it at night. Now, try as we might, we could not figure out a way to get this tent dark enough to really simulate night during the daytime, so we're gonna do the next best thing. We filmed this last night. We'll show you night plus wind plus rain, the ultimate boss level for the dock for x ten.

And I think we've got a video of that so you can see what this looked like last night.

Really incredible work by our engineering team. So what's the secret to making all of this work?

Well, honestly, the secret is there is no secret. There's a million hard problems in here that we've solved over the last ten years. Everything we've learned from deploying these systems, we've built almost fifty thousand drones, shipped them to over two thousand enterprise and government customers. All the learnings we've gotten from that trickles back to making our systems more reliable.

We've also done a ton of hard work on Doc for X10. So up to now, we've done thirty five thousand plus flights on this system. We're continuing to accumulate them at a rapid rate, and we've done a huge amount of reliability testing. So we've taken the dock, we've frozen it, we've baked it, we've shaken it, we've cycled it over and over again.

We've learned a huge amount in doing this.

But the real key, I think the single most important ingredient, is the tight integration between hardware and software. So we designed the drone hardware, the dock hardware, the software running on both of these devices, the cloud software. All of these things are tightly coupled together such that they're tightly coupled together, they're tuned, they're fine tuned, they're iterated together to make the complete system work the way that it needs to.

So I'm gonna guess what some of you may be thinking.

When can you get one?

Well, the good news is we've already started doing field trials, and we'll hear a little bit more about that in a minute.

We're going to start doing our first customer deployments in early access at the beginning of next year. And even though we're officially announcing this product today, many of you have actually already placed orders. So we're building a bit of a backlog.

We expect new orders placed today to start delivering sometime next summer.

But to see what this thing is actually doing in the wild now, I'd like you to hear from some of our early testing partners.

To be able to pre position drones on top of a police stations and those drones being able to remote deploy and operate beyond visual line of sight for drone operations is the game changer.

We want drones and docks all over the city of Oklahoma that can respond to a call, can respond to an officer, and give them eyes in the sky before they even arrive on scene. Seeing what the dock for x ten can do up here, I think we're one step closer to making that a reality.

You can say, hey. I'm done. You can hope we're trying to home with the little, the little icon there.

That's awesome.

Seeing these new docks here on-site are real impressive because we really wanna push the limits of getting out well beyond, you know, ten miles and really interested in the autonomous effort. Being able to launch a drone automatically, fly predetermined missions, looking at our critical zones.

With Skydio, we've had an incredible opportunity for us to see the new docks in action and be able to work hand in hand with the engineer to understand why we do things certain ways so they can better understand our problems and how to solve them.

Skydio x ten dock is definitely the future for drones from our perspective. Skydio was able to deliver on that technology.

We have two of them here being lost remotely, and it's working. You know, there's there's over forty mile per hour winds. It's over a hundred degrees, and it's been able to work in situations where we'd never dreamed we'd be able to use a drone.

Very impressed with the capabilities of the product. We feel that the opportunities with this type of technology is tremendous, and we're just scratching the surface at this point.

So the drone is great. The dock is great. But this isn't really about the dock or the drone.

We really think about this in terms of delivering end to end solutions that have the impact we know this technology can have, helping to keep our community safer, help to keep the lights on, and help to secure our nation. So we're gonna talk through each of these, and we're gonna start by how drones can be used in public safety.

So like many of you, I had the chance to see some of the pioneering DFR programs that got stood up five years ago, and DFR is one of these things where when you see it, you kind of just can't unsee it. It's such a powerful technology. It's so transformative for public safety, and all of us owe a huge debt of gratitude to the agencies that did incredible pioneering work and a lot of manual effort to stand up and prove out this concept.

And ever since we saw it five years ago, it's really been a product North Star for us at Skydio. X ten was a major step forward towards delivering on this vision, and Doc for X ten completes the story.

I want to show you how this should work. An event can be detected in a city.

You can localize that event with a sensor.

That position is fed into dispatch, which goes into DFR software. A drone is launched and can fly itself on unseen.

The information that drone generates is shared with the people who need it in real time, and they can resolve the situation quickly and safely.

DFR fundamentally changes outcomes, and you can see this in the numbers.

So these are global statistics.

When you get there in more than five minutes, the probability of making an arrest is less than twenty percent.

You get there in less than five minutes, and that goes up to over sixty percent.

Drones fundamentally accelerate response time.

They're also amazing for efficiency.

There's a lot of data that suggests that you can clear up to thirty percent of calls without having sending an officer at all. This is a huge savings.

But most importantly, there's evidence that suggests drones can reduce the use of force by up to fifty percent.

This is the single most important number.

DFR saves time, it saves money, saves resources, and it's going to save lives.

So the real question is, how do we do this?

Well, it's kind of complicated. There's a lot of different pieces that need to come together. There's hardware and software.

There's operating procedures that need to change, and we know that there are alternatives out there on the market. We see a lot of these kind of patchwork solutions where maybe you're getting a drone from somebody, you're getting a dock from somebody else, then there's a couple pieces of third party software and you're kind of trying to stick them together. There's some holes there that you're left to fill on your own. It can be made to work, but it's just fundamentally not scalable.

That's why we created Skydio DFR Command. This is designed to be the ultimate software platform.

I know we're excited about DFR command.

I am too.

It's the ultimate software platform to run a DFR program end to end.

So we break down DFR into three key phases, ready, respond, and resolve.

And DFR command covers all of these. So in the ready phase, it'll show you where all of your assets are. It shows you the health of the assets. But it's also got the integrations to get the data you need in to drive DFR, so integrations with the CAD system to get call time and location, integrations with, body cameras, you know where your officers are.

For the respond phase, we've built the world's best remote piloting interface. It enables you to fly and control multiple drones simultaneously.

We continue to invest in features under the hood with autonomy to make this useful, so we're today introducing Skydio Pathfinder, which uses building data to find intelligent routes through cities. So not only can it pre plan paths around buildings, it knows about airspace constraints, wireless coverage zones, and it takes all of this into account to find the safest, best, fastest path to get you where you're going. Not only does it work in urban environments, it works in rural environments. So it has terrain data, it can find its way through a valley or around a mountain.

A key part of responding is getting the real time information to those who need it, so ReadyLink fits perfectly into this story. You can use the QR code or the link that's generated. You can share it with anybody who's going to benefit from this live stream. This is one of our most popular features across public safety.

But the work isn't done.

In the resolve phase, all that data you generate automatically uploaded to your evidence system, and we're also building features like a transparency dashboard that enables you to build trust with your community by showing them what you're doing with your drones and the impact that it's having.

So let's take a look at DFR command and some representative scenarios. So these are illustrative, but you can see that you get these these predefined zones that you can put into the software. So these group together relevant assets. They show you where drones are. They show you the the state and health of the fleet, group together incidents. So here, we're looking at Oklahoma City where they've mapped them to their divisions.

We can look at a more rural deployment. So this is Pasco County, Florida. So this is a larger operating environment. Here, you might put some docks around your more populated area, but you could also merge this with a patrol led DFR model with drones launched out on patrol in the, in the sparser populated areas.

All of this nicely integrates together. If we wanted to look at a more local example, we could go to San Mateo County. So here, we're seeing their districts, and, we might as well go more local than that. So here we are in DFR command in Seascape, California, and it looks like we've kind of found ourselves in the middle of a real time crime center.

So we have FUSUS BIACSON up here. We've got officer King. He's got his body camera live streaming into FUSUS BIACSON, and the data from that body camera is actually being fed into DFR command. So his position is gonna show up in DFR command because that could be a really helpful relevant signal.

So oh, let's see what's gonna happen here in Seascape. Looks like we we might have a stolen vehicle, so this is another alert coming by FUSIS.

And, fortunately, we've got officer Deepu John here. So great. Yeah, Adam. Let's see what we can do in DFR command.

Yeah. It looks like we have, hit from the ALPR here at Seascape Resort. I'm gonna send a drone out there and coordinate a response.

So you'll notice on the left, we've got the map. The location of that incident is being rendered by the the red icon, the flashing red icon. The location of the dock is in blue. It's about twenty seconds from when this incident comes in to when we're launching the drone. So this drone's getting airborne right now.

To Charlie, good morning. DFR command. I see that you're responding to the ALPR hit. I'm sending DFR one out to your location.

So not only is the location gonna show up in the map, it's gonna show up in augmented reality in that live video feed. This gives you exactly the context you need to see where you're headed.

To Charlie, we're about ten seconds out.

To Charlie, DFR one is on scene.

We'll advise if we have eyes on the vehicle.

To Charlie, I have a possible gray Subaru just turned southbound on Seascape Resort Drive. We're gonna track the vehicle with DFR one.

So the augmented reality shows the location of the incident. It also can overlay all of the streets. You get the context to see what street you're on. You can even see the hotel room numbers here.

To Charlie, we're still tracking the vehicle. Looks like the vehicle's making a right into a residential parking lot.

Close call with the tree wasn't a close call at all. Thanks to Skydio autonomy.

We know we know there's a few folks out there that wanna do remote operations without autonomy. That team's nuts to me, but to each his own.

Two Charlie vehicles pulling into a parking spot on the right side.

Driver door is open.

We have a male that exited the vehicle. Blue jeans, black tank top, tan hat.

Two king on the air. Two king. I'm getting reports of a large party at the south end of Seascape. I see you're nearby. I'm gonna send d f r two to your body cam location.

To Charlie, be advised, we still have eyes on the suspect. He is running down a path on the right side of the parking lot.

We're still tracking the suspect.

Alright. He looks like he just spotted the drone. He just looked up. He's ducking under some trees on the left side of the path.

We're gonna fly down lower.

We still have them on thermal. We're gonna go down and see if we can order them out with the speaker mic.

This is the Metropolitan Police Department. We see you with the drone. Walk up the hill and towards the officer with your hands up where we can see them.

Busted.

Two Charlie. Looks like the suspect is cooperating. He's walking up the hill towards you with his hands up.

So this is actually not Farfetch at all. We hear more and more reports from our customers of people actually surrendering to drones.

DFR one to central. Looks like, two Charlie's gonna have one in custody here.

Alright. To Charlie, if you're good, I'm gonna send DFR one back to base, and we're gonna start the automatic evidence upload. To king. To king. I'm fifteen seconds out from your location. I see the tent.

So we've got two drones in the air now. So there was a noise complaint somewhere on the south side of Skyscape, and we're using augmented reality again to render the location of that body camera. So that blue pillar is the location of the officer on the ground, officer Brian King.

To King. We're arriving on scene now. We see the tent.

I'm gonna fly down a little bit lower so you can get a better look.

Yeah. To King, you can disregard this. This looks like just a pretty cool gathering of industry experts.

DFR two, DFR two is returning to base. Adam, I'm gonna hand it back to you. It looks like we have an all clear.

Alright. Protect and serve. Nice work, Deepu.

Pretty amazing stuff. That was all live.

All the stuff's integrated. It all works together. We flew two drones at once. We responded to two incidents, all managed live from right here on stage.

You mentioned this, but it's kind of subtle but important point. So all the evidence we just generated is going to get automatically uploaded, and we're also introducing a new feature, which is the Skydio watermark. So we know having watermarks on body cameras is incredibly valuable. It gives you the time stamp, gives you the time, location, goes into evidence. You can synchronize it. So now the drone can do the same thing. You can line it up with the body camera footage, tells you what sensor was active, everything you need from an evidentiary perspective.

So we're fortunate to work with a lot of incredible pioneering customers, but one of the most special to us is the Oklahoma City Police Department, and I'm really excited today to welcome captain Jason Bussert from Oklahoma City to the stage to share a little bit more about their program.

Hey. Thanks for having me, Adam.

I appreciate it.

You know, Mercario's right. This is where the magic happens. I mean, I learned so much from you all. I remember going up and seeing Las Vegas PD, Brad and his team, and learning how to manage large groups of drones at the same time. New York PD came down, and we spent some time a couple weeks ago. I mean, you really get to know each other because that's that's where the magic happens, to get to know these guys.

More you know them, the better the product's gonna be. Because they get that instant feedback, and it helps me when you all interact with them. And as you're developing your program, it'd be I mean, pattern it after what Rick Smith and Adam's done over these years. Hey, it works now.

Just watching Adam work with this team. He's had a passion for drones as a kid and then he's developed that into a company. He surrounded himself with quality leaders and and those quality leaders he empowered them to do the job they needed to get done and he grasped that vision of the drones as a first responder, drones for law enforcement, drones for utilities and have pushed it the envelope incredibly well and we're greatly appreciative of that. And as you're developing that program for yourself, I mean, that's what I've tried to mirror a little bit. I mean, I'm fortunate to have Dax Lepore.

He he has taken that vision and ran with it. I I don't do the day to day stuff. He runs it. And he surrounded himself with great people and great leaders so the program has grown and developed. And that's how we've developed our program in Oklahoma City at least.

You're too kind, captain Bussard. I mean, I you guys have done some incredible work. I think maybe to to give people some of the context and background, it'd be great to hear just kind of the quick history of the program.

Like, how you guys got started, what kind of deployment models you've done, and then maybe we could talk a little bit where we are now and where we're going in the future.

Okay. Yeah. We'll try to do that in a two minute session.

So in two thousand nineteen Take as much time as you want.

Thanks. We're here for you.

I'm sure you are. In two thousand nineteen, we went live with an r, an RMS, a records management system. And we knew it wasn't what we needed. They spent twenty years trying to get it in done and done and it was our cake by the time we got there.

So, you know, we need to replace our body worn cameras. We needed to have in car video. We need to have LPR, e citations. We needed a whole slew of things and we wanted that all to work together.

And you know, at at the time there wasn't a whole lot of companies that did that.

You know, we had we brought in the blue company, the orange company, and the yellow company, Axon, and seen what they had. And they all presented what they had and did big shows.

But Axon had the vision, to be able to tie things together, to have real time everything meshed. I mean, we spend a lot of time developing that records management system.

You know, eighteen months, hundred hour weeks, it it was brutal. But during that time, twenty twenty happened.

And that kind of changed law enforcement.

No longer did we have a plethora of people wanting to apply. We were two hundred officers down. So looking at how can technology help law enforcement, you know, I looked around and looked at different things that I could spend money on and drones obviously was the answer. The force multiplier.

But how to do them and how to do them in Oklahoma City when you're short of manpower. And Chula Vista was a great model starting out. But that requires two people. I mean a person on the roof and a person flying the drone and we didn't have people. We had zero people.

I said that man, that's not really gonna work. A great model and it is very efficient and effective but we didn't have the manpower to support that. And we looked around and said, okay what else is out there? You had drone units where, you know, there are specialized people to fly these drones.

Great pilots but they take twenty or thirty or forty minutes to get on scene and we're six hundred and twenty square miles so that's difficult. Said I I really want to put these drones in the hands of the people who are there on scene and enable them to be able to fly it but I was nervous about that because well, these are inexperienced pilots. Sure we have some Blackhawk pilots and patchy pilots on a part of our program but we also have people who've never flown a drone getting these drones and using them. So I didn't have a good idea of what to do and fortunately, you know, I've known Matt Murky for several years And when he was with other companies, I I worked with him and he we developed a nice trusted relationship and he said, Jason, I got something for you.

You won't believe this. It'll blow you away, but I have a drone that you can't crash.

I promise you, it'll work.

And I said, no. You gotta be kidding. And he did. He brought it and we pulled a girl out of the academy, a farm girl. I'm I'm sure she had a flip phone. I mean, she did not could not use technology to save her life. But, favor this person, don't get me wrong, and said, hey, fly this.

And she said, what are you talking about? I don't know how to do that. And she took the controller and she was able to fly it. And we said, crash it.

Crash the drone. And she's like, you're kidding. No. I said, no. I want you to see you shatter that drone.

I I don't believe this guy. I want you to see you destroy this drone. She said, okay. And she tried.

She tried flying into a tree. She tried flying into windows. She tried flying into buildings.

Couldn't do it. I said, alright. You've sold me.

And and so from that point on, we developed the drone program. We rolled that into our Exxon contract. We've got sixteen drones. So we had one drone on every shift at every division available twenty four hours a day, seven days a week to respond to any call in that area. So they're there that quick, that fast, and doing the job they needed to do to save our officers and save our citizens.

It's it's great stuff. Really fantastic work.

Now now you guys I know you guys are also interested in DFR. We were really lucky to get to partner with you to deploy early version of the dock, But I understand that you're also doing some DFR operations very recently. Can you share a little bit more about about what you've done the last couple weeks?

Sure. Yeah. We have the state fair every year, and it's a great event. About a million people show up every year.

So we you know, as a technology person who looks over and sees what what's working, what's not working, it's a great environment sort of to see year to year. It's the same number of days, eleven days, same location, same time of year, same number of people. So you can compare year to year to year what works and what doesn't work. And so this opportunity we had with to fly X10s this year was great.

I mean, we hand launched because obviously we didn't have the docs yet.

But, and we had three drones that we kept flying. And there was times that, you know, we would fly out in the parking lots, with a night since, we see people you know, you you see them wandering in the parking lot. They're not walking to the gate. You know they're doing something weird. They're not doing what needs to be done. And we light them up. And all of a sudden you see them go and walk away, walk to their car, get in their car, and drive away.

We just prevented something from happening. There was a time we kicked a a group of juveniles out. We followed them for an hour and a half with drones. Piggy piggybacking the drones.

So, you know, the drone when they needed to come back, we'd find another one there and fly the other one back. So we had one on scene watching them walking miles away. And we knew what they were doing. And, of course, you know, they were waving to us with one finger and whatever.

They knew we were there.

And through that, I mean, we prevented things. But the big tell is a million people, all these cars in the parking lots for hours on end, we had zero auto burglaries and no car stolen during the time the fair was open.

That's never happened. Not even close.

Alright. Well, captain Brosser, thank you so much for joining us here today. We're incredibly thankful to be working with you, and we can't wait to bring DFR to OKC. Yeah.

Appreciate it. Thank you.

Alright. So the way that we think about our products and our technology here is we're really trying to build the ultimate integrated drone solution. We've got the dock, the drone, DFR command, but we know that this stuff doesn't exist in a vacuum. And we kind of think about this complete system as this information spoke, but you need to connect it to the hub in order for it to be useful. And when we look out in the market, we see what our customers are doing, by far, the most common hub that we see is Axon.

They've built a phenomenal ecosystem of devices, tasers, body cameras, fleet cameras. They've got a great ecosystem of software to aggregate this data, make it useful, integrate it into your operations. So we're incredibly excited to be partnering with Axon to make this seamless and easy for you to adopt, And I'm really thankful today to have the CEO of Axon, the founder and CEO of Axon, Rick Smith, joining us live to share a little bit about his vision for drones and DFR.

Appreciate it.

Hi. Thanks, Adam. It's really an honor to be here. You know, like Adam, I'm a founder, who is passionate about a problem I wanted to go after. I'm just a little older than he is, doing this a little longer.

My passion stemmed from a situation where two of my friends were shot and killed.

And I just became passionately interested in the topic of violence as a technology problem. To me, it's still bizarre that the way we stop people in twenty twenty four is we blow holes in them with bullets. And so, of course, I'm best known at our company for the taser. We're on a mission to bring captain Kirk's phaser to life.

And from there, we've had this guiding principle that helps us make decisions. There's many things you can do as a business. And look, we're a public company. There's a lot of pressure about, you know, what sort of products you're gonna develop. And this principle that, look, we wanna do things that ultimately protect life.

And in fact, two years ago, we distilled that down even more specifically to we wanna work on things that are gonna have a measurable impact and inspire our teams and our customers and our partners. Like, what if we could achieve something that would change the world? And so after a fair amount of analysis and really think about this, we announced our moonshot. This is this idea we believe we could cut gun related deaths by fifty percent over a ten year period in policing.

Now I wanna be really clear. This is not a critique of police using lethal force.

It remains the most reliable way to stop a threat. This is a critique of us, your technology vendors and ecosystem. We need to give you better tools. And we came to fifty percent, but I personally read hundreds of OIS, officer involved shootings and officers that were shot and killed. We wanna bring both of those numbers down. Now, of course, we started with this from the perspective of what if we gave better less lethal weapons so you wouldn't have to resort to lethal forces often if we gave you more range and it worked better? And that's a big part of this.

However, if we really wanna stop this, we've gotta take a holistic view. No one single tool is going to do it. And one thing that shocked me as I read through all these lethal force incidents, Ninety percent of them, nine out of ten times an officer uses lethal force. And the moment they choose lethal force, it's because they are personally at risk. It is their own safety. So they show up to help others, and often the threat turns to them. So nine out of ten times, the officer is deploying lethal force in protection of themselves.

So of course, that begs the question, what if we didn't have to put officers at risk?

Right? And as a technologist, I tend to look around the world and, okay, what technology solutions are there? Well, it's pretty obvious drones and robotics could give us the ability to not put human beings at risk. That'd be a major step towards this moonshot goal.

And in fact, this idea is not a new one. For hundreds of years, human beings in dangerous situations, whether it's in policing or frankly even in war, would send in not human beings in the high risk situations. You know, they'd send in a canine.

Well, canines obviously bring lots of capability.

We don't wanna put them at risk either, and they also have some limitations. They can't really show you what's happening inside a building. They can't talk to you. They may bark a little bit. It's kinda hard to determine what's going on. But imagine, you know, if your canine could fly.

And, ultimately, a well constructed drone program, you're not gonna care what the dock looks like. Like, great tech isn't the thing that distracts you.

When you really get the tech working right, you shouldn't have to think about it. A cop on the street, it should be like, I've got my intelligent flying partner that can show me what it sees, that can communicate, and that can get anywhere faster than I could. It's kinda like a flying superhero k nine. So, yeah, this is a bit comedic, but, this is how I think a great drone program should ultimately work.

Now we take a lot of great pride in building tech ourselves.

But anytime we look at, a new area we wanna go, first thing we'll do now is we'll do a scan and say, okay. Who's out there already doing this? And is there somebody we could partner with that's already solved this problem? And over the past five years, we have widely partnered with a variety of drone manufacturers. I'd say three, four years ago, we identified it's unclear, like, who the leader is going to be.

And we we keep our systems open, and we still continue to partner widely. But what's become clear in the past year is there is one company that has emerged as the clear leader, and that's Skydio.

You know, Adam made what I'd say some people might have thought a risky bet years ago going all in on autonomy.

I'd say that's kind of a similar bet to what Elon Musk did with stuck with, SpaceX, betting on reusability of rockets. And those big bets take a long time to mature. They're high risk when you make them, but when they pay off, you see breakout capabilities. And so as we look at the real possibility of drones, yeah, it's not standing there on the side of the road flying one.

It's when the drone just shows up. Now to do that, you've got to do all the things Adam talked about today. You've got to have a drone that flies largely by itself reliably. It's got to be where you need it pre in place.

You've got up the network of connectivity, and then ultimately, we're proud to be a part of this. Now passing data feeds back and forth for yesterday was the first time I saw that augmented reality overlay.

That was fantastic. Like, we can now see where officers are based on our body cameras feeding into their system. And so earlier this year, we announced a real tightening of our partnership with Skydio, and that means we're now sharing engineering resources, building a more integrated experience.

And the doc, I think, is kinda the last piece of this puzzle that will bring together and make DFR, eyes in the sky, available to every officer as simple as if every officer had a well trained canine, again, but connected to human intelligence and able to show you video feeds and all the fantastic things we can do with this ecosystem. So, Adam, thanks for letting me part of your show this morning. Congratulations on building a great company and a great capability. We're, delighted to be partners.

Alright. Thank you so much. Thanks.

So Skydio and Axon together, we've got the complete integrated solution to bring DFR to life.

The DFR error is here, and we are ready to run trial. So the doc may not be available in the second half of next year, but you can get started on DFR today. We are setting up our teams to show up in a city, run a thirty, sixty, ninety day trial. Whatever you want to do, we'll staff it, we'll run it, so you can see the kind of impact this can have for your agency and your organization.

All right.

Let's talk about keeping the lights on.

So what does this really mean? Well, it's pretty simple. It means you need to go down less, and when you do go down, you want to get back on as quickly as possible. So we dive into each of these a little bit deeper.

Going down less is really all about reliability.

Now, the status quo in inspection is time based schedules, where you're going out, you're inspecting, you're replacing your assets on a time based schedule. The gold standard is condition based maintenance.

From a resiliency standpoint, this is about incident response. When something goes wrong, you want to get there as quickly as possible. You want to know what happens so that you can plan around it and fix it.

And underneath all of this, you have the need to maintain the security and integrity of your assets.

And Doc for X10 is transformative for all of this. It gives you a complete real time digital understanding of all of your assets so you know the condition of all your assets. If something goes wrong, you can be there in seconds or minutes. You can understand it.

You can share that information with your organization. Doc for X10 completes this story. So as you are probably gathering, we love live demos at Skydio. We maybe love them a little bit too much.

Keeps us up late at night. But it shows off what the product can do. So we think it's best to just see this live, and to help demonstrate this, I want to bring somebody special to the stage. So I first met Corey Hitchcock five years ago when he was working at Southern Company, one of our energy utility customers, and it was immediately obvious that he was just a visionary in space.

He had a vision for how you could deploy drones to help energy utilities run more safely and efficiently. And fortunately, a year and a half ago, we were able to convince him to join Skydio. So please join me in welcoming Corey Hitchcock to the stage to show you what the Dock for X10 can do for energy utilities. Alright.

Alright. Hey, everybody. So so backstage, I was building this, this three d model or or three d mission, but, I got a request to gather some data from one of these breakers. It's gonna be breaker Charlie Bravo eight five zero. We're at a energized three forty five kV substation in, Corpus Christi, Texas. It's an AEP station.

And we're gonna go grab a counter reading, something pretty difficult to do off of this breaker.

The distribution control center wanted to know, what that counter reading was and make sure that it was good.

So we're gonna start this mission, and we're gonna grab the counter reading from a prearranged mission or preplanned mission. And then, this is definitely live. So, it may take just a second to get the, the aircraft ready to go.

We are gonna grab the mission one more time. We are gonna grab the mission one more time.

There we go. Okay. So mission's ready to go. We're gonna go ahead and launch.

This mission is like a full breaker inspection.

It's autonomous. The first, thing you're gonna see is the drone take off and then grab a, overview shot of the breaker. It's kinda like the standard, kind of security and safety inspection.

And then once we do that, we're gonna move into, in close proximity to the breaker control panel, and, we're gonna grab the counter reading. Normally, this would require like a truck drive. We're literally looking at something that's mechanical, something that, that you have to see with your eyes to verify.

So, so we're gonna, move in, and now we're now we're rocking this autonomously.

The little window to the bottom left is where the breaker, counter reading is, and we're looking for echo Charlie two. It's gonna be the middle phase. That's what operated over the weekend.

So we're gonna adjust. Let me adjust the camera down a little bit so I can see the breaker. There we go, echo charlie two. And I can confirm that breaker reading is one four seven.

While we're here, we're gonna let the drone move to its second way point. That's gonna be the SF6, gas pressure gauge. So this this breaker is an SF6 breaker, uses the gas as its arc snuffing medium, and that's gonna be green. So it's, this is a go, no go gauge.

Oh, hold on a minute. Hello?

Ariel Ops Center. This is engineering. Are you there?

Oh, hey. Yeah. What's up?

The first Moab switch off the breaker was operated multiple times during the recent storm. I don't have anyone to roll a truck right now. Can you go check that it's closed and also check the fence line for post storm integrity?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I'm gonna take over manually here. And, so I stopped that autonomous mission. I'm taking over manually. We're gonna fly and check out that Moab.

So the cool thing about this this ability is that this is a remotely operated switch. The switch was closed from an operations center hundreds of miles away.

That operations center doesn't have any real time intelligence other than an amp reading of the state of the switch. So we're gonna pop up here and check out these contactors with the, the RGB cameras. So we're gonna zoom in on those contacts.

All right. We can see the contacts. I don't see any discoloration. They look closed good and I can see some electrical joint compound there in the paddles. So that that all looks good. We're gonna back out and check it with thermal and see if there's any delta across the the three phases.

Alright. I don't see any.

Alright. Cool. So we're good there. And the last thing we're gonna do is go check the fence.

We've had some, some security issues at this, very remote substation. So we're gonna see, Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute. I see somebody right there.

Oh, they're running away. They must have seen the drone. I think, I think we're good. Oh, they got wire cutters in their hands too. Look at that.

Well, they're, it looks like they're out of here. We'll take some photos and and report them and, and then we'll also increase our frequency of security patrols of this station. But right now, we're gonna go ahead and return to home.

It's really cool because the drone's gonna navigate through this energized environment autonomously.

So it's, using occlusion avoidance, and it's moving its safest path home, which I I still get excited about. It doesn't get old. Like, it just doesn't get old. So we're moving back to the dock here. The dock's already open, and, and we're gonna land. And then once we land, we're gonna upload the data, autonomously or automatically, and then it's gonna go to the cloud where, you could integrate with with, whoever it is you use to analyze the data, and I'm gonna let Adam talk a little bit more about that.

Love those live demos. All right. So Corey set it up there. The question is, what can you do with all this data?

We don't just care about capturing it. We want to deliver the complete end to end solution, and this is another area where partnerships are having a real impact. So we've got five amazing technology partners that can ingest this data. They're using Skydio Extend to get the data very quickly into their cloud systems, and they're building an incredible suite of AI analytics.

So they can detect damage. They can see the health of the assets. They can monitor the health of a solar farm. So all of these folks are here today.

I highly recommend you go out and check out their visualizations and the kinds of insights that they can deliver with the data that you generate.

So we know this is a journey. We have customers that exist everywhere on the spectrum. We have folks that are just getting started giving drones to their frontline staff. We have folks that are doing remote operations.

And I always like to say the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. We have customers that are already starting to experiment with central digital monitoring. As a company, we're set up to work with you across this spectrum.

We can get you started with frontline inspection, and we can also go all the way to central digital monitoring.

Let's talk about securing our nation.

So usually, when people think about drones in the context of defense, you think about front line use. You think about soldiers putting these things in the air to get better information on the battlefield, and that is super, super important. We're gonna talk more about that in a bit. But national security actually starts well behind the front lines.

The US has over seven fifty military installations covering twenty seven million acres. Two point three million people live and work on these facilities around the world. We're really talking about hundreds of small cities all over the world, and securing these facilities is extremely challenging. You don't have to look very far to hear stories of bases being broken into, things going wrong.

And in the best case, this is just incredibly expensive because you have to shut the whole base down. They go onto high alert. And the worst case, it can lead to the use of force and, unfortunately, really bad outcomes.

So in addition to this, a lot of the assets that live on these bases are at historically unhealthy low levels.

These things are falling into disrepair, and we know that these are applications that drones can help with. There's all kinds of useful things you can do with docked drones on bases. So the most obvious is perimeter security and control. I think this is so obvious that it's just an inevitability. I can't imagine a future where we don't have dock drones helping to secure the perimeters of our military installations. And there's actually a lot of parallels here to drone as first responders. So all the technology that you saw for DFR maps almost perfectly to the kind of security operations that you would want to do on a military installation.

In addition, you can use that same asset, that same dock drone, to inspect ships. They can inspect planes. They can inspect other infrastructure on base, so every building needs to be inspected. A lot of these bases have their own power generation and transmission. Those assets can be inspected, same thing you saw with the energy utilities. You can also use them to count inventory. So there's all kinds of great stuff you can do with a dock drone on a military base.

But everything we've talked about today so far assumes that you have access to the internet. It's an online architecture. You've got the drone connected over five gs or LTE. You've got the Skydio remote ops software running in the cloud.

And this has a lot of benefits. It means that you're leveraging all the investments that we've made into security, the security investments of our cloud partners. It's low cost, low friction. It's the right answer for almost all of our customers, but we know it's not going to work for many of our government customers.

A lot of folks face pretty onerous restrictions on the kinds of software that you're allowed to buy, how you're allowed to deploy it, and those restrictions exist for good reason, because they operate with extremely high security postures. These are very sophisticated customers who can manage and run their own infrastructure, and they operate in austere environments where they need flexibility.

So that's why we created this local network architecture.

So this enables you to do everything you just saw with dock and remote operations but in an offline context. And there's three key ingredients here. So the first is X10D.

X10D is the version of X10 that's designed to not depend on the internet. So it can be completely offline or it can just connect to a local network.

Dock for X10D is the parallel to that. So this is a dock that's designed to operate offline or on a local network.

These can use different radio links. We recommend getting started with Skydoo Connect SL. And then the final piece is being able to deploy Skydoo remote ops software on infrastructure that you control and manage. And we've been investing in this architecture over the last couple of years. We've actually been into the field, and we've deployed it with some of our customers. We've gotten the chance to bring some of these use cases that we've talked about to life in actual field operations, and we've gotten some incredible feedback from our customers that helps us develop it, but also has out validated that there's real value here to be created.

Skydio drones are also already doing asset inspection. So Skydio drones are being used by Lockheed Martin to inspect the C-one hundred and thirty. We have drones out there that are being used to three d scan our naval vessels. This is another one of these ones that's so obvious it just has to be the future where you can put a drone in the air, you can get a complete digital picture, you can see rust, you can see the health of the asset. We've got partners that are doing great work on this automatically detecting damage.

So dock drones can have an enormous impact from a national security perspective, but the frontline use is still really, really important.

And I'm incredibly proud of the work that we've done over the last three years as Skydio has become the world leader among allied nations for ISR drones on the battlefield. We've delivered over six thousand drones to the US and our allies. This covers two hundred plus distinct organizations in twenty plus countries, and fortunately, most of our customers aren't at war, but Skydio drones are becoming a key element in joint multinational exercises all over the world. I'll give you just a couple of examples. So there's a great name here, Wallaby Walk in, in Australia. So this was using drones for explosive ordinance disposal.

Project Sabre Junction in Europe, this was the US army demonstrating the ability to rapidly deploy across Europe with our partner nations. And finally, Project Convergence. So this was operation here in North America, deploying cutting edge AI and robotics and experimenting with the future of how all these systems can work together. And one of the things we take pride in as a company is we always want to be there in the field alongside you, helping to make sure everything's working, enable you, train you, get the feedback so that we can constantly improve our systems. So for many of these, our Skydio team has actually gotten into the field along with our customers to make this stuff successful.

And we continue to invest in X10 to make it the best platform in this space, so we're working on increasing survivability.

We've got best in class autonomy. Macario mentioned the, the multi drone demo. It really is special, and this shows the direction of where the whole space is going.

But we've also designed X10 to be an open modular system. You can put payloads on there, and we're continuing to invest in the ecosystem around this, in particular, working with the open standards that are out there. So you can use this system with ATAC. You can use it with MISB for imagery data. We're RASA compliant in the communication protocol. And we've got a great ecosystem of partners that are building solutions around on top of X10. We're seeing some incredible things come together.

Now most of our customers aren't at war, but unfortunately, two of them are, and there's nowhere in the world where this technology is more relevant or more important than Ukraine.

I've had the opportunity to visit a couple of times, and what the Ukrainians are doing with drones is incredible.

Their perseverance, their innovation in terrible circumstances in defense of their nation is is truly inspiring. They're using drones at a massive scale that the world has never seen before, and we've delivered a lot of drones to Ukraine. These drones have been deployed in the most severe electronic warfare environment the world has ever seen.

Just like everywhere else, we've learned a huge amount from that. In addition to all of our other customers, we've taken all of those learnings, we've rolled them into X10, and we are committed to making X10 the most useful, survivable, capable, small UAS on the front lines of Ukraine where it's needed most.

Ultimately, all of our customers will benefit from the investments that we're making there.

Now one of the things that Ukraine has done, it has heightened everybody's alert. Where are drones made? Where are they coming from? And who ultimately controls them.

Now as that has happened, a lot has been said and written about the US drone industry, the relative strength, their weakness, the competitiveness.

It's very obvious that there's a competition going on against China in this space.

And as the leading US company, a lot has been said and written about Skydio.

It has not escaped our attention that we've picked up a handful of very vocal critics over the last couple of years, and one of the themes that comes up enough that I want to address it head on here today is the competitiveness of the industry, and in particular, this idea that Skydio is lobbying because we're not competing on our products. So yes, we're gonna dive into this.

So I want to take a little bit of a step back.

Let's think about where this industry has been and a little bit about where it's going. So these things started off looking like consumer toys. You know, you give your kid a quadcopter, they fly it around on Christmas Day, it's great, but there's just no question now that this is essential technology for our most critical industries. We've seen it here today.

We see it out there in the world. And as important as drones are now, they're only going to become more important because we're still living in this kind of one to one manual world where you might have one operator flying one drone, you've got one drone per thousand soldiers. We're headed to the opposite of that. We're headed towards a future where one person can command and operate ten, one hundred, one thousand drones.

Now, to accept a future where we're dependent on our geopolitical adversaries for technology this critical would be completely insane, and that's not a Skydio opinion.

This is consensus opinion among the US government, and it goes back almost ten years starting in twenty seventeen. So ten plus agencies have either banned these drones or voiced serious concerns about the national security implications, the cybersecurity implications, spans multiple presidential administrations.

Now, yes, Skydio does have a lobbying team. When we speak up on this issue, we believe in long transition periods, funding to help ease the pain for customers that have built programs on Chinese technology, but I'll tell you, most of what that team is focused on is budgets for our customers to build and scale programs.

In fact, the example you saw from Bethel, Alaska earlier, that was supported by a grant that we advocated for along with our customer. And then we're also working on the regulatory frameworks that make drones more useful in more places, like the waiver that we were able to get in partnership with NYPD.

And our competitor outspends us by a factor of four in lobbying. Something tells me when they're lobbying, they're probably not lobbying for customers' budgets. But the truth is, this is a much bigger issue than just the two of us. This spans every critical industry.

It spans telecommunications equipment, chips, social networks, cars, raw materials like steel, ports, cranes.

It really doesn't matter what Skydio or DJI has to say. This is a global issue. It's about competitiveness. It's about national security, and it's starting to take on an air of inevitability, but the inevitability doesn't mean it's not painful. You know, there's people out there that have built businesses around and on top of Chinese systems. They're proud of the work that they've done, and they should be. There's nothing wrong with that.

I can tell you where our focus is. Our focus is on the future, and we believe the potential of this this industry is ten x where it is today. I really believe we're still in the first or second inning. We can create a world where we have ten x the impact, we create ten x the value, and we're trying to build as big a ten as we possibly can for that world.

We've got twenty plus Skydio resellers or technology partners here today. We've got two thousand customers around the world. We've got hundreds of other partners that we're working with all over the place, and the thing that we're most focused on is the products and innovating to build this future. We've talked about a lot of this here today.

We announced doc for x ten, Skydio Connect Fusion, Pathfinder, DFR Command. These are just a few examples. We're we're pushing the state of the art as fast as we can to pull this future forward, and we know everything's not perfect. We've talked about that here today as well.

Sometimes innovation is two steps forward, one step backward. When we make a mistake, we're gonna fix it, we're gonna find it, we're gonna figure out what went wrong, and we're gonna do everything we can to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Is Skydio the underdog? Yeah. I think you'd have to say that we may still be the underdog. I think the US may still be the underdog.

But from a historical perspective, betting against US innovation in aerospace is a losing proposition.

That's right.

This is the country that invented the airplane. This is the country that ramped aircraft production to help win World War two. This is the country that broke the sound barrier, put a man on the moon. After we were originally behind the space race, we caught up and won, got to the moon first, pioneered commercial space flight, commercial space travel.

Now the future of aviation is about electrification and autonomy, and the leading edge of electrification and autonomy is drones. The leading edge of drones is dock and remote operations. This is the future right here, and the stakes are high. We have an opportunity to keep our community safer, help keep the lights on, help to secure our nation.

And, ultimately, it all comes back to the people, and I can tell you when the people at Skydio wake up every day, we're focused on making our products better and making you more successful. It is such an honor for us to partner with you on this journey. Thank you so much for joining us at Skydio Ascend, and I can't wait to see you out there in the field.