Drone Dominance Starts with ISR
No unit maneuvers without ISR. As drones multiply across the force, the advantage belongs to the unit that can see farther, understand faster, and act decisively, while reducing risk and cognitive burden for the Soldier. Watch the replay for the first public look at Skydio's breakthrough innovations in collaborative autonomy, plus Adam's update on Skydio's $3.5B investment to advance American drone dominance by securing our industrial base.
- [upbeat music]
- All right. [audience cheering] That's right.
- [clears throat] Welcome, everyone.
- It's, uh, it's an honor to be here with you this
- evening.
- So
- to anybody paying attention ...
- Hopefully, this clicker's paying attention.
- It may not be.
- So to anybody paying attention, it's pretty clear that drones and
- unmanned systems are gonna be central to the future of armed conflict.
- Uh, and if we're being honest with ourselves,
- it's also pretty clear, uh, that
- we are not currently on the leading edge of this technology in the West.
- Uh, our competitors in China got a head start,
- and the scale and
- scope and deployment of this stuff on the battlefield in Ukraine is well ahead
- of what we are currently capable of doing in the West.
- Uh, now I've been building drones my whole
- life.
- Uh, we started Skydio 13 years ago.
- We've been working with the Army for the last eight years, uh,
- and I have never been more optimistic about the progress that we're making.
- Just over the last 18 months, I've seen more good stuff happen than the
- prior
- decade combined. Uh, and we are here tonight to talk
- about what we think we need to do to win the future of unmanned
- systems. So
- it's often said that history doesn't repeat itself, uh, but it does rhyme,
- and I
- think there's always a lot you can learn by looking at historical examples.
- Now, in my opinion, the single most impressive,
- important ex- display of military industrial might
- in this company's-- in this country's history, uh,
- was what we did to win World
- War II.
- Uh, but basically all of that was built on a
- civilian technology foundation. This was a different era.
- The standing military was much, much smaller.
- Uh, and in today's dollars, we were spending, in total,
- just a few billion
- dollars per year before the war started on military equipment.
- We had a thriving automobile industry.
- We had a thriving civilian sector building all kinds of industrial equi-equipment.
- And in the span of a year, basically all of that, uh, was
- converted to military production.
- And civilian production actually shrank, uh, and almost overnight, we
- massively scaled up, uh, our military equipment
- production. Uh, so that civilian technology
- and production foundation turned out to
- be critical. Uh, but I think a little bit more subtle
- behind-the-scenes fact
- that everybody who works in technology and product development knows is the best
- products are born out of iterative feedback and intense competition
- between companies. Now, wartime is the pinnacle of this.
- There is no more intense competition than compa- countries
- literally fighting, uh, for their existence.
- Uh, there's no harsher environment that leads to more faster technology
- development, uh, than wartime. Uh, but it's very
- difficult, I would say it's actually impossible,
- to replicate that kind of
- mentality in peacetime. Uh, and in fact, in peacetime,
- the most intense competition between companies and the leading edge of
- technology,
- uh, happens in the civilian sector.
- We've seen this across a bunch of different categories over the last hundred
- years.
- Uh, and because of that, the overall takeaway is
- that civilian technology
- strength is foundational to national security.
- In the drone world, right now at least, that is kind of bad news for us, uh,
- because China dominated the first decade of drones.
- Drones really grew out of the consumer electronics industry.
- China ran very aggressive industrial policy for multiple decades to get
- all of that stuff manufactured in China, which gave them a head start on drones
- and robotics. Uh, and because of that, we know with
- basically 100% certainty that our adversaries are gonna be flying
- civilian Chinese drones on the modern battlefield anywhere we meet them
- in the world today.
- So I actually think the most important competitive battleground for
- drone dominance is not in the military space, it's in the civilian space.
- Uh, and this story has not always been
- positive.
- So we started Skydio in 2014. There were dozens of
- other US companies that started before or around the same time as us,
- uh, and basically all of them failed.
- And conventional wisdom at the time, if you roll back to the 2010s,
- was basically there was just not gonna be a US drone industry.
- It was all gonna be done by China. A lot of people just accepted
- that as the way of
- the world. Uh, some people were even okay with it.
- Uh, we never subscribed to that at Skydio.
- Um, and if you look at the reality today, this is a staggering fact that I think
- very few people are aware of. This has flipped.
- So, you know, in 2019, our first year of generating real revenue
- as a company,
- we were basically a rounding error in the civilian drone market.
- This year, 2026, we will do more sales, this is
- based on publicly available, available data,
- and we know our own numbers, we will
- do more sales than DJI to US civilian customers.
- This is not counting military customers. This is just the US civilian market.
- Now, we're not selling to consumers. This is selling to professional users.
- Uh, but this is a staggering fact that many people thought
- would have been impossible just a couple of years ago.
- Uh, the question is: How are we doing it?
- Well, we benefit, no question, from an overwhelming
- preference from our civilian customers.
- These are folks, uh, they can buy any product they want.
- DJI drones are still for sale in the US today.
- Uh, we benefit from an overwhelming preference
- from our customers in the civilian
- markets to buy US-made drones. We are immensely and
- eternally grateful from that. Uh, we also benefit from US
- policy designed to support the US drone industry, uh, just as our Chinese
- competitor benefits from Chinese policy designed to support Their drone
- industry. A lot of people kind of think that's the
- end of the story, uh, you know,
- that the, the US is doing what- everything it can to s- to start a,
- a drone
- industry. Um, I actually think that that misses the most important fact.
- So when we started Skydio in 2014, we made a massive
- early bet on autonomy, AI, computer vision.
- These were not major trends in 2014.
- Uh, this stuff was barely working in the
- research lab, uh, but we saw the
- potential for what it could do to make drones more useful to more people.
- And what's happened over the last five years, it is, it is transforming the
- civilian market. So you pick public safety.
- If you visited a public safety agency and looked at their drone program in
- 2019, you'd see something like this picture on
- the left.
- You'd see skilled, dedicated operators manually flying
- Chinese
- drones doing great work. Uh, if you go and visit today, the chances are
- pretty good that you'll see something like that picture on the right.
- You will see dock-based drones that live on rooftops that can be flown
- remotely and autonomously, uh, that fundamentally
- transform the way policing works for the better.
- Uh, and because not a lot of people are aware of how this works,
- I'm gonna show you
- an example. So I could pick from tens of thousands of
- videos here at this point.
- This one happens to be from San Francisco Police Department.
- This was a drone that was launched from a dock on a rooftop in
- response to a
- stolen vehicle. Um, and it gives the officers this incredible
- asymmetric advantage.
- Uh, they can watch what's happening from the
- air.
- They can see this guy's got a stolen vehicle, he's stolen plate.
- Graciously holds it up so we can read the plate from the air.
- Uh, and then they pick their time and place to intervene.
- So they send out a plainclothes unit, they roll spike strips, uh,
- this guy can't go
- very far, they take him into custody, and it's safer for everybody.
- It prevents a bunch of crime in the community, it's safer for the officers,
- uh,
- it's even safer for the suspect. Uh, and this is happening at
- scale across the US today. Most major cities in the US
- have some form of what's called drone as first responder deployments.
- And the same concept is also happening in energy utilities,
- with departments of
- transportation, with construction companies,
- across our critical
- infrastructure. So we've delivered at this point over
- 50,000 drones to
- civilian customers. Uh, they are averaging right now two million
- flights
- per year, and that number is doubling year over year.
- Uh, and this is an intense competitive market
- where a lot of our technology was
- forged. This is what drives the continual
- improvement through software and hardware
- of the reliability of our systems, uh, that's put us, uh, in a
- position that many thought-- many people thought
- was impossible just a couple of
- years ago. So what are we doing in the national security
- space?
- The way I think about it, we really have two key missions here.
- The first is to build the domestic industrial base, uh,
- to win a robotic war of attrition if necessary.
- So all of this production capacity that we're building up to serve our
- civilian
- customers puts us in a position, if needed, to pivot, to turn all
- of that towards military production in war if we need to.
- Uh, and then the second is to apply, apply this autonomous
- world-leading technology foundation to make sure that our war- warfighters have
- world-leading
- capability. Uh, so on the first front, we made a major
- announcement earlier this year. Uh, we're gonna spend three and a
- half billion dollars over the next five years in the domestic drone
- industry in the US. This is going into five X-ing the size of our
- own factory.
- It's gonna create thousands of jobs, and a billion dollars of it is going into
- suppliers. So we're now big enough, uh, that we can be a great anchor customer
- for a US motor vendor, US battery company to help get them
- started, uh,
- and we are proud and ha-happy to do that. We see it as paying it forward.
- [audience applauding] Yeah, thanks.
- Paying it forward for the preference that we get from our customers to buy
- US-made
- products. We want to work that up into the supply chain.
- Um, so building drones in the US is cool all of a sudden.
- I kind of think we're the OGs of building drones in the US.
- We started doing it in 2016 when everybody thought it
- was a terrible idea.
- Uh, and we now have a decade of experience
- under our belts in what it takes to do
- this successfully, uh, and, and do it at scale.
- Uh, we are not yet at the level of maturity,
- uh, and
- capacity that, uh, China is, but I'm 100%
- certain that we can get there. And every month, every week,
- every day, we're getting better, and we're investing in the people,
- the systems,
- the processes to do this stuff more and more efficiently at higher and
- higher scale.
- Uh, we're very proud of that. The second piece, and this is
- really what Skydio is all about, is the products themselves,
- the technology.
- How are we applying this stuff to give our warfighters the capabilities that
- they need? Uh, so the embodiment of that today
- is the Skydio X10D, which by a pretty wide, wide margin now is
- the most fielded tactical ISR system, uh, in the West.
- This thing, uh, has sold over-- So in total, we've sold 20,000
- drone systems to military customers.
- Uh, this is used by 30-plus allies around the
- world.
- Um, it's part of the Army Short Range
- Reconnaissance program of record
- and used by dozens of Army units. Uh, it's used by every
- branch of the US military, uh, and a bunch of other federal
- agencies. And a lot of the technology in this thing
- has been forged by
- some really harsh lessons we've learned in Ukraine.
- So when the predecessor to X10, uh, was delivered to
- Ukraine in 2022, they didn't work very well.
- Myself and other members of the Skydio team went there, uh, ourselves to see
- firsthand what was happening, uh, and everything we learned has been
- incorporated into the X10D. Now,
- when people think about drones in Ukraine, uh, they oftentimes think about
- these fairly horrific videos, uh, we see of drone strikes.
- Um, and both sides put out these videos of the
- last couple of seconds, uh, of
- these drone strikes, uh, to show what they're capable of.
- Um, but this really hides most of what's
- happening.
- Uh, so if you look sort of behind
- these last few seconds, you'll see a super laborious manual
- process of somebody flying this thing multiple kilometers, multiple minutes,
- sometimes multiple hours to go out and navigate and try to find the
- target, uh, and actually strike it.
- Um, and even that really hides what's
- happening because it turns out when these
- guys fly, they're typically operating with a team of
- three
- So they got one person flying the drone, they've got an engineer responsible
- for, for getting the aircraft ready to fly,
- and then they've got a navigator who's
- looking at a map and looking at the camera feed to try to figure out where this
- thing is. Uh, but even that is really just half the
- story. Uh, all of this is based on continual
- ISR, and the Ukrainians have small drone ISR in
- the air
- constantly, twenty-four/seven on the front lines, also
- operated by a team of three people that really powers every
- single strike they're delivering. Uh, this is not a new idea.
- I mean, ISR has been foundational for military
- success.
- Uh, aerial ISR has been foundational for
- military success for three centuries.
- It started with balloons, the aircraft hit in World War I, uh, its
- original application was ISR, uh, you know, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the
- U2. Uh, there's thousands of examples of this, uh,
- where aerial ISR makes a difference.
- What we're seeing in Ukraine is really just a continuation of this
- trend, but it's
- still heavily manned. You have three people on the ground flying
- one system. Uh, and to really get to the next chapter of
- ISR, we need a paradigm shift in how this stuff
- works.
- Uh, and that is ultimately why we are here today.
- Uh, we are super excited to launch ISR
- Command.
- So this is a product that we've been working on for years.
- Uh, it incorporates everything that we've learned from all of our,
- our military
- users, uh, and it's designed to orchestrate fleets of
- robots to
- deliver collaborative, persistent, scalable ISR in
- contested environments. So you can think of ISR Command as the
- software hub that makes scalable tactical ISR possible.
- So it ties together mission collaboration with the actual mission
- experience of flying the drone with the connectivity and the drones
- themselves to deliver the end outcome and the result.
- We're gonna talk through and unpack what this actually means.
- So ISR Command is designed to be scalable. What does that mean?
- So a unit operating in a contested environment, nobody's
- looking for another job to do, right? Everybody's got their hands full.
- Everybo- everybody's got something, uh, that they're responsible for
- that they need
- to take care of. And if we wanna introduce tactical ISR into
- this environment in
- a scalable way, we need to make it more autonomous.
- And the foundation for autonomy in a contested environment is
- GPS-denied visual navigation. So this is a core competency of Skydio.
- Our drones have been vision native from the beginning, from when we started the
- company in twenty fourteen, and over the last couple of years,
- we've done the work
- to extend that visual navigation system to do everything needed in a contested
- environment, to work at higher altitude and to even,
- using Anchor Point,
- reference the visual navigation into a global coordinate frame.
- And the end capability is that in a GPS-denied environment,
- so what you're seeing
- here is an actual flight in a GPS-denied environment, you can do fully
- autonomous navigation, where you just click on the point on the
- map where you want
- the drone to go, the drone's location, and the, the sensor point of interest,
- where
- its camera's looking, shows up on that map just as if it had
- GPS in a fully automated way.
- The second piece of, of automation is the communication.
- Um, so we've done the work to integrate
- adaptive frequency hopping into the
- radio, so it'll detect jamming, it'll switch to a clean frequency so
- that the
- operator has the best shot at continual situational awareness and
- command and control.
- ISR Command is also designed to be collaborative.
- Uh, so ISR is only half the story. It only matters
- if you're getting information to people who can make decisions based on what you
- see and take action based on what you see.
- Uh, too often the status quo is this: You've got some poor
- operator who's holding a drone controller in one hand, they're looking at an ATAK
- device in the other screen, and they're basically trying to transpose
- information between these two things.
- Uh, so the drone controller will have the
- information they need for flight.
- It shows them where the drone is, the in-flight telemetry.
- The ATAK device typically has the information they actually need for the
- mission,
- shows them where the friendlies are, where the hostiles are,
- everything they might
- care about, and they're having to do the mental
- gymnastics to get the information
- back and forth between the two systems.
- Uh, rather than having one person that's half
- as effective, we'd rather make two
- people twice as effective and enable them to do their jobs better.
- Uh, and that's what ISR Command is, is designed to do.
- So it is natively built around military standard markers that flow
- bidirectionally. So all the telemetry from the drone gets
- out to the network to
- go where it needs to go. But perhaps more importantly,
- all the mission
- information gets into the flight controller.
- Uh, so everything about
- all the known information in the local operating environment is right there, uh,
- available to the person who's flying.
- Um, so ISR Command with mili- these military f- markers is designed to
- natively feed the common operating picture.
- Uh, so that could be TAC, uh, could be NGC2,
- all of the telemetry and video render seamlessly.
- And in fact, if you look at the systems
- that integrate the sophistication and the
- level of standard, uh, available on the X10D through ISR
- Command, uh, you're typically talking about much higher
- end, much more
- expensive, exquisite ISR systems.
- And because of those integrations, it's in a position to feed the high-end
- systems needed that can consume this information, uh, to, to get
- outcomes that matter on the battlefield.
- So ISR completes the effects loop.
- It's also designed to be persistent.
- What does that mean? Well, in any real operating environment,
- the chances are
- pretty high that you're gonna have multiple targets that you care about, uh,
- and
- you're gonna need to maintain eyes-on for long durations.
- Now, one person flying one drone in a
- one-to-one way is not gonna be
- able to achieve this task. And ISR Command is designed to
- break that one-to-one operating paradigm.
- So one operator with one controller can command multiple
- devices.
- Um, so what you're seeing here is two drones in the air with basically
- zero piloting attention or input.
- Um, so one of the most common features and the first thing that we've really
- focused on is automated on-station relief.
- Or when the first drone runs low on battery, the second drone can launch,
- go out to
- its location. When it gets there, the first drone returns home.
- And all of this navigation, all of this flying can be done in a
- GPS-denied environment. Uh, and this is the kind of thing that enables
- you to never lose sight of the objective.
- Um, so, so far we've been looking at slides,
- we've been looking at videos, we've
- been looking at graphics. Uh, all this stuff is great.
- It's all been filmed in a real test environment.
- Uh, but we're big believers at Skydio in doing
- it live to prove that this stuff
- actually works. Uh, so unfortunately, flying here in DC is a little bit
- difficult.
- Uh, but we are now gonna go live to our test
- range, uh,
- somewhere in a contested environment in Texas.
- Uh, so this is a live stream,
- uh,
- somewhere on the frontiers of Texas. Uh, so this is a live stream.
- We're seeing, uh, common operating picture here,
- NGC2 and TAAC. Uh, we're automatically
- following this vehicle using a feature called Skydio Shadow, and all of this is
- happening in a GPS-denied way. We've turned off GPS, uh, so the
- drone is navigating completely visually.
- Uh, we saw somebody put something awfully
- nasty looking into that truck,
- so the operator has gone ahead and marked that as
- hostile. Um, so that's showing up on the common
- operating picture,
- uh, as a hostile. It is now being dynamically tracked,
- and the telemetry
- of the vehi-- of the drone location and the vehicle location is being shown in
- TAAC. So you can see that red marker is moving along the dirt road.
- And remember, this is all GPS denied.
- This is using the drone's visual navigation system to figure out where it
- is,
- figure out where that truck is, send the location, uh, of the telemetry.
- Uh, and now,
- um, because that guy put something, uh, nasty looking in the back of the truck,
- uh, we can use this to deliver effects.
- Um, so this can be used in conjunction
- with an FPV strike drone. Uh, the operator of the FPV strike drone gets
- the same
- feed. They get the same telemetry. They can use that to do the navigation in.
- Uh, so I think we have a strike drone in the
- air now
- following our truck here.
- Uh, it looks like it hit its target.
- Unfortunately, we're not allowed to put real explosives
- on the drone in our test
- range in Texas. But what we are allowed to do is put explosives in the
- truck and
- remotely detonate it, which we will do for you now here because
- we want to blow
- some shit up.
- [laughing]
- Yeah.
- [cheering]
- [applause]
- Very satisfying.
- [laughing]
- All right.
- Uh, so I would, I would like to give a shout-out, uh,
- to our friends at, at Modal
- AI that are part of the, the Drone Dominance program for helping us
- out with the,
- uh, the demo there.
- [applause]
- So rightfully so, there is a lot of focus on the economics of
- drones and immense pressure to deliver as much capability, uh, in
- as cost-effective way as possible.
- And I think it's important for all of us to keep in mind, uh, the efficiency of
- what actually matters, which are the results that can be achieved on
- the
- battlefield. Uh, so if you think about fifty strike drones
- that might be
- deployed to try to hit targets, uh, the statistics on how effective these
- things
- are, are widely varied. Uh, you can look at all sorts of different
- data from
- Ukraine, where they're being employed most heavily.
- I would say very optimistically, without any form of aerial
- ISR, uh, maybe thirty percent of these things might
- hit their target.
- And that, in practice, I think that number is, is probably much lower
- if you have
- no IS-ISR. Uh, but if you look at the ratio of the cost of a
- strike drone to an X10D, uh, if that X10D
- can enable just four more of these things to hit their target,
- uh, it will pay for itself.
- Get a little help with the slide.
- Um,
- now in practice, I think it's gonna hit way more than,
- than four more.
- Uh, ISR is a paradigm shift in making these
- things two, three times
- more effective. Um, so purely from a strike effectiveness
- standpoint, uh, X10D pays for itself, and ISR Command pays for itself
- extremely quickly. Another way to look at it
- is ISR alternatives.
- Um, and, uh, I'm not claiming that all these things have equivalent
- specs or
- equivalent capability, but X10D is literally three orders
- of magnitude cheaper, uh, than something like an MQ-9 Reaper.
- And if you look at the aggregate cost of the Reapers that we have lost
- in Epic Fury, you could literally buy fifty thousand
- X10Ds, uh, for that amount of money, uh, which is a shitload
- of ISR capability, uh, in, in technical speak.
- Uh, and it's actually even cheaper than
- smaller systems.
- Um, it's cheaper, uh, than, than soldier-borne sensor.
- Uh, I think it's really an unbeatable value
- when you think about the amount of
- capability that you're getting in a five-pound system, uh, that one
- soldier can operate, uh, by themselves.
- So
- that's ISR Command. Uh, this is software that we've been working on for
- years.
- Uh, it's evolved rapidly over the last year,
- especially to deliver world-leading
- capability to our war fighters. Um, and its
- intent is, is to solve, uh, some of the most important challenging
- problems that we face on the modern battlefield.
- But,
- uh,
- this is not the only set of problems that our military has to deal with where
- small
- drones can be impactful. Um, so the military also has
- intense physical security problems.
- We operate hundreds of bases in the US and around the world that
- cover thousands of acres, multiple miles of perimeter fence line.
- Uh, and the physical security challenges at
- these places
- actually parallel a lot of what we see in the civilian sector with
- corrections, uh, with data centers, with distribution centers,
- uh, and so on. Um, so the stakes in these environments are
- incredibly high. We're talking about millions of dollars
- being on the line, human
- lives lost if things go wrong. Uh, because the stakes are so
- high, a lot of people and a lot of technology has been thrown at
- this
- stuff over the years. Uh, but the status, so-- status quo in physical site
- security is still super challenged.
- False alarms, poor coverage, uh, all kinds of inefficiency.
- I would say it's, it's kind of fair to think of this thing
- as still an unsolved
- problem. Uh, but autonomous flying robots, like the one that we've got right
- here Fundamentally change the operating math.
- Um, so this is a dock-based X10, uh, and the dock turns the drone
- into a fully autonomous device that can be flown remotely
- and autonomously.
- Um, so the dock can open, it can take off, fly itself
- whenever, wherever it needs to go.
- It can autonomously land itself back in the dock.
- Uh, it's completely driven by software.
- Um, so you can use autonomous drones like this
- to do patrol, where the
- comparison against a person on the ground is totally unfair.
- There really is no comparison. Same thing for responding to incidents.
- Um, you know, a drone can respond to order of magnitude
- more incidents
- than you'd ever get to on the ground.
- And if you kind of add it up, if you compare a 24/7 guard post
- to three of these docks, uh, you're talking about 10X the
- patrol coverage, uh, and 10X the response time at least,
- uh, for what you can get done with, with dock drones.
- Uh, and this is what motivated us to develop
- Security Command.
- So Security Command, uh, is designed to orchestrate fleets of
- flying
- robots to deliver a scalable physical security force, the likes of which has
- never before been possible. Uh, as I said before,
- we love to show it live. Um, so we're now gonna go to see Security
- Command in
- action. Um, so just like our customers, Skydio has physical security
- concerns. We've got drones constantly in the air
- over our corporate
- campus headquarters in San Mateo, California. So this is live.
- These are real drones flying over our corporate campus in San Mateo, California.
- Uh, and we also have a large testing site in
- Colorado in collaboration with
- Colorado State University that we want to make sure is safe
- and secure.
- Um, so we've also got drones that have been launched from docks doing
- autonomous
- patrol there. Uh, Security Command integrates with all kinds
- of other systems.
- One of the most common applications of our drones, especially over the last year,
- has been counter UAS. Uh, so we integrate with Dedrone,
- one of the leading
- providers of counter UAS detection and other providers out there.
- Uh, you can see now on the map, we are getting an alert for a
- drone flying somewhere that it shouldn't.
- Um, so that shows to-- shows up to us with an alert.
- We can see its location on the map, uh, and we can now take one of the drones
- that's already in the air to respond over, uh, to see the operator.
- So you can see in augmented reality in the video feed, we're getting the location
- of the operator.
- We're getting, uh, the location, uh, that the drone was launched from.
- Um, and all of that information is available for the person to see
- live. So we can
- take control here and pan over, uh, and get a view of,
- uh, whoever's flying this drone that they shouldn't.
- Maybe we'll punch in here. Yeah. So we've found the drone pilot.
- We can click on him. Uh, we can start following him.
- This information can be live streamed to responding units on the ground, uh, to go
- and take care of the situation. Um, and we also can have drones that
- are just continuously doing automated patrol that are looking out for
- anything in a detection zone. You can basically say, "If a person
- or vehicle shows
- up in this place on the ground, I wanna know about it."
- And that's what hap- what's
- happened here. So we've got a detection zone that's
- triggered on a person.
- Uh, it's, it's found him. It's automatically locked onto him.
- Uh, it's sending an alert.
- I have no idea what he's doing there, but it doesn't look good.
- [laughing]
- Uh, so the drone is now autonomously following
- him.
- Um,
- now it really doesn't look good.
- Uh, so we've got a bunch of his buddies
- getting out of the van.
- Um, we've got a drone viewing it from both
- sides.
- We've got complete situational awareness.
- What is he holding?
- Yeah, it's really not good.
- Send in the FPV strike drone.
- [laughing] But the point is that
- we have, uh, complete command of the situation from the
- air, thanks to
- Security Command. We've got drones autonomously tracking
- both targets.
- We can share that information with responding units on the ground, uh, and,
- uh,
- and mitigate the threat. So everything you just saw, uh, is running
- in our public cloud, which implements the highest security
- standards you can have
- in a public cloud environment. Uh, and that's what, uh,
- you know, all of our incredibly security conscious
- civilian customers are
- using, uh, and many government customers as well.
- But we know it's not gonna be for everybody,
- especially in the military space.
- So we also can run Security Command in an on-pre- on-prem,
- self-hosted environment. Uh, and mid-- by mid-next year, we will have
- FedRAMP High. Our team has already made rapid progress
- on this.
- Uh, we're going through the wickets now, and w- we're confident we'll be at Fed-
- FedRAMP High, uh, for mid-next year to bring Security
- Command to
- everybody in the federal government space that can benefit from it.
- So that's Security Command.
- It sits alongside ISR Command. Uh, and all of
- this sits alongside DFR Command, Drones First Respon- Responder
- Command, which we sell to public safety, and Asset Command, which we sell to our
- critical infrastructure customers, so energy utilities, departments of
- transportation, uh, oil and gas companies that use our drones to
- continuously inspect their infrastructure.
- And each of these commands is designed to be an end-to-end solution
- that
- ties the hardware together to solve problems that matter to our
- customers in specific industries.
- We're doing more and more work to specialize our systems really towards the
- needs
- of specific users in specific industries.
- Uh, and that's a key part of how we've been
- able to move the industry
- forward. Uh, but we're a drone company and we love building
- drones. And over the last year, we have made rapid progress on
- that front as well.
- Um, so earlier this year, we started shipping the Skydio R10,
- which reuses the same technology fou- fash- foundation of
- X10, but gets it into a smaller, lighter, uh, more affordable form
- factor that can be used in the most challenging indoor environments.
- Uh, and it's really designed to h- send the robot ahead of the person.
- So it's being used in indoor tactical environments.
- It's being used for indoor confined space inspection.
- Every day now, we're seeing incredible stories, uh,
- with what our customers are
- doing with the R10. Uh, and a couple of weeks ago, we
- launched the Skydio F10, uh, which I think is, is one
- of the most innovative fixed-wing products that has ever existed of any
- class. Uh, so this thing uses what we call robotic
- take-off and
- land technology. So it sits in a mega dock,
- which you can think of
- kind of like a drone vending machine. The robot arm can pick up one of the
- wings.
- Five of those things can fit in there. Transitions into forward flight.
- It's got a hundred mile an hour top speed, two hours of endurance.
- Uh, and we've got the wing tip out on the
- gimbal, which nobody has ever attempted
- before, to the best of our knowledge.
- But it means that you get a completely unobstructed view of the ground.
- This thing basically becomes a perfect camera floating in the sky, uh, as long as
- it's turning left like Zoolander, which its software, uh,
- always commands it to
- do. Um, so this product is still in development, uh,
- but it'll be in
- customers' hands, uh, next year, and we're incredibly excited about the
- capabilities that this thing is gonna deliver.
- So
- we're building a family of flying robots. They all speak the same language.
- Uh, they're all built on the same core
- autonomy technology foundation,
- and then we're building the software to tie them together, uh, and make them
- useful, uh, for all of the industries that we serve.
- And the common thread across all of our customers is you guys do hardcore,
- real world physical work in high stakes environments, where putting
- sensors in the right place at the right time can fundamentally change
- an outcome. That's what we're all about as a company.
- Uh, we're super excited about it, and I can't wait to see you guys out there
- in the
- field. Thank you. [applauding]
- [upbeat music]
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32 Mins 25 Secs