6-Month Review: Skydio X10 & Remote Flight Deck | CEO Reveals New DFR Features
Adam Bry is co-founder and CEO at Skydio, the leading US drone company, and the world leader in autonomous flight. He has two decades of experience with small UAS, starting as a national champion R/C airplane aerobatics pilot. As a grad student at MIT, he did award winning research that pioneered autonomous flight for drones, transferring much of what he learned as an R/C pilot into software that enables drones to fly themselves. After graduating from MIT, Adam co-founded Google’s Project Wing. He has co-authored numerous technical papers and patents, and was also recognized on MIT’s TR35 list for young innovators. He currently serves on the FAA’s Drone Advisory Committee.
Quick update: We have marked 6 months since we delivered the Skydio X10 and Remote Flight Deck to our public safety customers. See the transformative impact these tools have had on community and officer safety and get exclusive look at the exciting new features and functionalities rolling out for our Drone as First Responder (DFR) program.
Learn more about Skydio Drone as First Responder solutions: https://www.skydio.com/solutions/public-safety
Hey everyone it's been 6 months since we shipped our first x10s a lot of those drones are going to Public Safety customers so I wanted to give everyone an update on what's happening in the market we're at just an incredibly exciting time for drones and Public Safety the impact is phenomenal and now we're seeing the scale and scope of deployments get to another level we're seeing agencies like Las Vegas Metro Police Department lean into the patrol LE model where they're putting drones in the trunks of more Vehicles so they can be available on more scenes we're seeing NYPD do full drone is first responder with skyio drones flying out of docks autonomously in response to 911 calls we're seeing just incredible stuff on a daily basis from all of our customers having life-saving impact with drones so we've got a lot of great product out there in the wild now I want to give you an update on what's coming next from a product perspective we're about to ship our Spotlight accessory which pairs beautifully with night sense to give the Drone and the operator perfect visibility in zero light environments by Illuminating the scene so you can see exactly what you need to see even at night even in zero light environments later this summer we're going to ship our speaker and microphone accessory which gives you bidirectional communication to help deescalate the most dangerous situations and then on top of all of this we're doing more with the lights that are already built into X10 so you'll be able to configure them to do flashing red and blues just like you see on a police car as well as strobe for better Aviation safety skyio drones have always had the ability to do live streaming but now we're taking it to the next level with ready link ready link makes it super easy for the pilot or the operator to create a link and share that live stream with whoever needs it instantly you just create the link you can use a QR code you send it out and everybody on your team instantly gets access to that same live stream data another area where we've invested quite a bit is on our Integrations so we have apis that make it possible to get geospatial data from other systems into skyio Cloud this enables you to do things like get realtime CAD events location of 911 calls coming in along with the location of other officers maybe from their body camera and then on top of this we're adding a feature we call fly here now which does exactly what it sounds like it just sends the Drone to that location and this means that you can dispatch drones to the incoming location of calls or to the location of responding officers one of the features that I'm most excited about that are team built is this side by-side view with a 3D map that's oriented with the same point of view with the drones camera so this gives you the ability to see street names as well as other augmented reality information like the location of that call or the location of that officer right alongside the live feed which takes situational awareness just up to that next level as I mentioned we already have customers doing doc based operations in public safety but the thing that's really going to complete this story is the dock for X10 which I am touching right now you can't see it but is coming later this year so look it's a super exciting time for the market and we know there are competing Solutions out there it's no secret that DGI makes really good hardware and there's other companies that have tried to Frankenstein together a dfr solution on top of DJI drones but at their core DJI drones are designed to be manually flown one of the things that we think is really important for a successful dfr program to reach scale is autonomy which is of course something we bet really big on at skyio and we continue to lead the way on but another concept that we're finding to be increasingly important is the tight integration of the hardware and the software to run a dfr program so we design the drones the docks the autonomy software running on board the connectivity the cloud streaming the management all of these things together to work seamlessly which generally makes it easier for our customers to adopt and scale of course dfr programs don't stand alone and the other thing that we focused on is partnering with the leading Public Safety technology company out there axon to deliver the complete solution we generally think about drones being the spoke that you want to plug into your existing information Hub we've got a lot of great hardware and software out there today as you heard about there's more coming down the pipeline and there's a lot more behind that but at the end of the day the technology isn't what matters most what matters is the impact this stuff is actually having and it is such an honor for us to get to partner and work closely with agencies that are deploying this technology on a daily basis to help save lives help protect their communities help keep everybody safer uh and that's the journey that we're on with you.