Beyond the Build - Skydio X10: Airframe
Engineered with lightweight yet durable materials, the X10 airframe packs robust performance and advanced sensors into an ultra-compact, backpack-portable size, enabling operators to resiliently capture high-quality data and complete demanding missions in tough environments. Building an Airframe for Demanding Missions
- What's been proven so valuable to military forces is that a small drone that's
- small enough to be backpack portable and light enough to, you know, to, to,
- to be
- carried by a, a soldier can go anywhere with that unit,
- and it's an organic
- sensor that they own, that they can deploy, uh, quickly, uh, at,
- at
- the time and place they need it to get the information.
- Having the, the ability to, uh, make better decisions on the battlefield
- is
- key.
- Our overall brief was just to make our drone products better
- in every way possible
- from our, our past generations. Having to carry around a giant
- aircraft would be prohibitive in a lot of use cases, and so size ends up being
- really, really important. It also ends up being very difficult,
- like, making
- something that's super capable and very dense from a feature perspective
- is also really hard to make small at the same time.
- We've been able to incorporate all of these features into an overall product
- that's
- only four and a half pounds, which is just awesome.
- Every square millimeter, every cubic millimeter really ends up
- mattering, and you
- end up fighting for those in order to make the product really elegant and small.
- So the challenge in designing drones is you wanna make them as lightweight as
- possible. Any extra size is not, not only, like, extra
- material that you're... that customers are gonna have to carry around,
- that you're
- gonna have to build into the case, but also the, the mass.
- So you want everything small. You want it dense.
- And that goes down to, like, on the component level.
- You, like, take our main logic board. Everything is incredibly dense on here.
- I've been doing this dailies. You take a cross-section of the drone,
- look inside.
- Where is there wasted space? How could we move around components,
- interfaces,
- circuit boards such that we can take advantage of
- that wasted space?
- We have a lot of high-power electronics inside.
- That's what enables the autonomy system.
- That's what enables the radio to work really well, the cameras to work really
- well. And as a side effect of that, there's a bunch of heat that's generated.
- So in this case, we have about 40 watts of heat
- that has to be cooled, which is a
- substantial amount. And so part of the design of the core
- structure is, how do we
- remove that heat from the system as efficiently as possible?
- We intentionally decided to go with a three-bladed propeller again this time,
- similar to X2. The three blades will slow down the rotor
- rate quite a
- bit and reduce the overall noise footprint,
- and we know that's important to a lot
- of our customers.
- In terms of durability, we've chosen a few design features to
- enable
- this to be a rugged, like, enterprise product.
- For material selection on previous products, we chose magnesium and unfilled
- polycarbonates. On this program, we chose glass-filled and carbon-filled
- to increase the stiffness of the system, um, without taking on
- extra weight.
- Our arm structure is an ultrasonic welded assembly, and so we're able to
- basically fasten two pieces of arm material together
- in a continuous way around the length of the arm without using screws
- or snaps or other things. So it makes the arms really strong
- and really light, uh,
- and really robust in general, and that's a new,
- new process for us on this product.
- These things are gonna be used and abused, you know? They're thrown in backpacks.
- They're, you know, dropped off tables.
- We wanna make sure that we're future-proofing all of these
- designs and validating
- them to how they will be used, not necessarily to just how they're being
- used
- today. We use large-scale thermal chambers
- that we can
- fly in hot and cold temperatures. We use these vibration tables to
- validate a lot of our really vibration-sensitive electronics.
- We have also developed in-house what we call our wind wall to simulate
- the highest degree of winds that we expect.
- We have water cycling rigs to kind of catch all of those edge cases of how these
- might be used by customers.
- So Skydio is a bit different in our development process from some competitors
- where
- we do a lot of the development in-house, so the design, the engineering.
- We do all of our reliability testing in-house.
- We're able to iterate more quickly and ensure reliable and efficient
- products that way.
- When you look at the team, the product design team,
- we're just excited to come to
- work every day. I think it's special to work at a place
- like that, and that shows
- off in our products. There's detail because there's ownership
- in the parts we're
- designing.
- So with X10, I think the customer should really be able
- to just achieve all that
- they need to do in their day-to-day work easier, essentially.
- It should be more efficient. It should be easier for them to move the
- product
- around, to use the product. They should be able to do whatever they
- need to do in
- their use cases with X10.
- [outro music]
Watch Time
4 Mins 9 Secs