Beyond the Build - Skydio X10: NightSense
Missions can extend into the night, and so can X10’s autonomy. NightSense enables 24/7 operation, maximizing both productivity and value of X10.
- [MUSIC PLAYING]
- So this is the first time that any drone will have vision-based navigation,
- obstacle
- avoidance at night, and in the dark.
- And it does this by having powerful add-on lighting attachments that go in the
- top and
- bottom payload bays that provide bright 360 illumination for the drone.
- That then allows the cameras to see and use our autonomy system.
- So this can be done in either visible light or infrared light.
- So we've designed a version of these cameras with lenses that can see both
- visible and
- IR light in the right ways of capturing the most value out of these lighting
- attachments,
- while not degrading the daytime performance and sharpness.
- The previous generation NavCabs only operated in the visible spectrum.
- But for this one, we optimized it for performance also in the near infrared.
- So we had to carefully work with a make a custom filter working with a filter
- design
- vendor to make sure the band is wide enough to let the active illumination that
- we're
- going to provide at night go through with high transmission.
- But not so wide that it can't promote his performance during daytime because
- there's
- a lot of infrared coming from the sun.
- It's very challenging, but we had to-- that's one of the reasons why we had to
- make a custom
- or what was available off the shelf doesn't check all the boxes.
- This is the super zoom view of our skydial system, which is a concatenation of
- the six
- navigation cameras.
- We have a six by five window and we want to be able to see if the vehicle can
- navigate
- at night without hitting the obstacles.
- And there's a lot of challenges involved because if you think about the robot
- itself
- is lighting up the scene around it, and so the shadows and motion of the drone
- itself
- will cause motion in the scene.
- Any sort of dust will cause reflections and backscatter.
- When you're flying at night, a lot of the dust in the air, fog in the air,
- anything that's
- small particles that reflect light show of extra bright in the image and throw
- off a
- lot of the vision-based algorithms.
- And then we can train the deep flow network that does your stereo correspond
- ences in your
- obstacle avoidance.
- That network can be more robust to basically not identifying those short little
- streaks
- as obstacles.
- We are able to transition between visual navigation when you're flying close to
- things, and then
- to GPS-based navigation when you fly further away and there's nothing to
- illuminate anymore.
- And so this enables a lot of the safe and trustworthy navigation that SkyDio is
- known
- for at night.
- The drone actually sending out this light surrounding the environment and using
- our
- same core autonomy engine is really magical and something that we've worked
- hard with
- our hardware design and camera design to enable and ship with this product
- today.
Watch Time
2 Mins 50 Secs