Skydio 3D Scan - The new era of autonomous inspection
Introducing Skydio 3D Scan, the first-of-its-kind adaptive scanning software built on top of Skydio Autonomy, the autonomous flight engine behind every Skydio drone. 3D Scan enables the drone to automate the data capture process needed to generate 3D models (digital twins) with comprehensive coverage and ultra-high resolution.
Learn more about Skydio 3D Scan.
- [upbeat music]
- Welcome to the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
- I'm Adam Bry, CEO of Skydio, and we're here today to launch
- 3D Scan.
- 3D Scan is a breakthrough autonomy software product that makes it possible to
- capture everything from bridges to accident scenes with incredible
- precision.
- 3D Scan makes it easy to fly inspection and mapping missions that would be
- impossible with any other drone.
- This is a product we've been working on for the last 18 months, but it's building
- on over a decade of research and development in autonomous flight.
- It's at the center of what we love to do at Skydio, build autonomous systems
- that make drones more useful than ever before.
- Now, you may be wondering why we're hanging out
- under a giant rocket to talk about
- 3D Scan.
- Well, there's a few reasons. One, rockets are awesome, and at Skydio, we
- love stuff that flies. Two, we needed some complex 3D
- structures to show off what 3D Scan is capable of.
- Most importantly, the early days of the US space program
- are near and dear to us
- at Skydio. These are some of the first flying
- computers that ran software
- for sensor fusion and navigation.
- Many of the algorithms that we run on Skydio drones
- that make Skydio 3D Scan
- possible have their roots in the software that took the astronauts to the
- moon over 50 years ago.
- [upbeat music]
- At Skydio, our mission is to make the world more productive,
- creative,
- and safe with autonomous flight, and we're incredibly excited to see
- this vision coming to life today with our customers.
- We have adventurers creating videos that would be impossible to film any
- other way.
- We have first responders using our drones for search and rescue missions.
- And we have bridge inspectors helping to keep our world's infrastructure safer.
- The Skydio autonomy engine makes anyone using one of our drones more
- capable and more confident.
- Now, at the center of almost every professional
- use of drones is some
- variation of creating a digital copy of the physical world.
- The data that drones capture can be used to spot problems, track
- changes over time, create reality models
- that can be used for all sorts of
- things.
- But our world is three-dimensional, and capturing this data can be hard.
- Whether it's inspecting electrical transmission towers
- or bridges
- or cell towers,
- traditional inspection methods usually involve some combination of a lot of heavy
- machinery and a lot of risk to the people involved.
- Drones have the potential to get better data while keeping everybody on the ground
- safer. But it goes beyond just infrastructure
- inspection.
- Creating digital twins and 3D models of the real world has the
- potential to
- transform industries.
- Consider first responders trying to document an accident scene.
- They could spend hours taking pictures manually, making notes,
- trying to operate a
- cumbersome laser scanner.
- Now, the most forward-leaning organizations
- have figured out how to use drones to
- help with some of these tasks. But 2D GPS waypoints fail at
- high-quality 3D capture. And trying to fly a complex 3D scene
- manually can be excruciating.
- A big part of the motivation for building 3D Scan was spending our time with
- customers and seeing what they were trying to do with drones.
- JIW was one of our first enterprise customers.
- They do bridge and other infrastructure inspection in Japan.
- Now, the Skydio autonomy engine enabled them to
- fly missions that were previously
- impossible. But it was still an incredibly complex workflow
- to
- inspect a large structure up to their standards.
- In this picture, you can see a pilot working alongside a
- civil engineer
- and a photogrammetry expert.
- Inspecting a bridge could take days of effort from this team of three, and they
- can't be sure they got the right data until they spend even more time
- post-processing everything.
- There's no way drones are going to scale to serve all the
- customers and
- applications that can benefit from creating digital twins of our world
- with that much friction involved in doing it.
- The path forward is more autonomy.
- 3D Scan builds on the Skydio autonomy engine.
- We're taking the next step. We're going from autonomous flight
- to automated workflows. At the core of 3D Scan is a
- revolutionary adaptive mapping engine that builds a high-quality 3D
- model of the structure as the drone flies, and then adaptively uses that
- model to plan all the right camera angles to guarantee coverage.
- Whether you want to build a 3D model or you just want the photos, with 3D
- Scan, you know you're gonna get all the right
- data, and you know it by the time you
- land. Even the world's best drone pilots would
- be hard-pressed to fly with the
- kind of precision and patience it takes to capture this
- data.
- 3D Scan makes it easy.
- As with all of our products, the best way to understand it
- is just to see it in
- action.
- Let's scan some rockets. To demonstrate 3D Scan, I'd like to
- introduce you to Alden Jones, Skydio's vice president of customer
- success.
- Thanks, Adam. Before I get started, I'd like to talk a little bit about my
- career so I can better explain why I'm so excited about 3D Scan.
- I'll leave you to it.
- Prior to joining Skydio,
- I started my career as an army officer, and after transitioning out of the
- military
- and into the commercial space, I launched a large UAS program,
- retraining one
- hundred and seventy-five existing employees to become drone pilots.
- Our objective was to scan twenty thousand cell phone towers a year,
- digitizing the company's more than forty thousand assets.
- Doing that with manual drones was incredibly challenging.
- As many of you with drone programs know, each crash or poorly
- reconstructed model can lead to doubt in your organization, headwinds with
- funding, or ultimately slow down adoption.
- Additionally, manual flight or cumbersome GPS planned missions
- require an intense commitment to training and often don't meet the
- expectations of executives who are looking for cost savings
- and more profit.
- My job at Skydio is to ensure that when our customers get their products,
- they can
- immediately get results. And to show you how easy it
- is to get those
- results, today, I'm going to scan the five F1
- engines on the back of this Saturn V.
- 3D scan is designed for maximum adaptability and ease of use.
- The user only has to complete a few simple steps and the drone will do the rest.
- The first thing we have to do is get it in the air.
- [drone buzzing]
- Now that the drone is up in the air, the first thing I need to do
- is set the floor.
- You can think of the floor as the lowest part of your volume that the drone is
- going to scan.
- The next thing I'm going to do is set the ceiling.
- You can think of the ceiling as the highest part of the volume or the top
- that the
- drone is going to scan.
- Both of these are represented in augmented reality as green and orange
- planes in the scene.
- Lastly, I'll set the pillars or the sides of the volume.
- Once that's done, I'll set the drone into exploration phase.
- While it's exploring, the drone will use its real-time computing
- to draw a
- three-D model of the scene so it can later plan its photogrammetric mission.
- Now that the drone is exploring, I'd like to take a minute to highlight
- some of the
- things that I'm not doing.
- I'm not climbing a ladder or belaying on a rope.
- I'm not in a snooper truck or riding in a bucket truck.
- I'm not putting myself or any of my team in danger in order to
- accomplish the
- mission. I'm also not relying on a magnetometer
- or a
- GPS. That allows me to fly unconcerned in
- places like
- this with overhead cover, next to large metal structures like these
- rocket engines, or near equipment that emits electromagnetic interference.
- Lastly, I'm not pre-planning a GPS mission through
- a
- painstaking manual process. I'm also not capturing photos manually,
- hoping that I collect the right data.
- I'm simply telling Skydio what I want to scan, and the autonomy
- engine is doing the rest.
- Now that we've finished the exploration phase, there's a few key parameters that I
- need to confirm.
- The first is GSD or Ground Sample Distance.
- You can think about that as the size of a pixel represented in
- real
- life.
- The next is overlap. You can think about that as the
- percentage of two adjacent photos overlapping in the real world.
- You can crank these both all the way up and get a high resolution,
- high fidelity three-D model with sub-millimeter GSD,
- or turn it down for a faster photo only inspection type use
- case.
- And then all I have to do is hit go.
- Now you can see Skydio is autonomously maneuvering between photo
- locations to execute the mission.
- All I have to do is monitor its progress and be a visual observer.
- Three-D scan has two new augmented reality features to help me do that.
- The first is real-time AR coverage, which shows me which parts of the
- scene have already been photographed with proper overlap.
- This allows me to look for blind spots, monitor progress, and ultimately
- eliminates errors.
- In our conversations with customers, we've seen up to a thirty percent
- re-inspection rate for drone service providers not using three-D scan.
- The next is AR Observer, which gives me another tool to be aware of
- my drone surroundings as it navigates the scene.
- I simply set a fixed camera position from a given vantage point
- and get to watch the drone navigate the scene in augmented reality.
- Lastly, if multiple flights or battery changes are needed, the
- drone will autonomously return home.
- The only thing that I have to do is swap the batteries,
- and three-D scan makes this
- seamless and easy. Once I relaunch the drone,
- it'll resume its
- mission right where it left off.
- [drone buzzing]
- Leaving a job site after a three-hour one-way trip, not knowing if you
- have the proper data for reconstruction, is an unacceptable waste of time and
- resources. With three-D scan's augmented reality
- views, that is
- no longer a problem.
- I can't stress this enough. It really is that easy.
- Whether you're a seasoned professional or brand new to the drone space, you
- simply follow the inputs in three-D scan's UI and you'll get
- the data you need. In the time it takes for you to set up a
- manual drone
- and plan a GPS waypoint mission, you could be done with the three-D scan.
- There is nothing else like this on the market. It is game changing tech.
- [outro music]
- Hey, Hike.
- Hey, Adam.
- While 3D Scan is up there doing its thing, let's learn more about the
- underlying technology that makes this possible.
- I'd like to introduce you to Hike Martiros, our Vice President of
- Autonomy.
- Thanks, Adam.
- So the autopilot that steered the Saturn V through its
- 13 missions in space was an engineering marvel of its time.
- The ring you see behind me is the instrument unit
- which housed the key
- sensors that made this possible, like accelerometers and
- gyroscopes, as well as the launch computer,
- which weighed
- 72 pounds and could process 12,000 instructions per second.
- It was an incredible feat.
- Well, half a century later, we've made some progress.
- The primary chip that powers each Skydio drone has many of
- the same
- sensors and 100 million times the computing power.
- Our founders and team have been working for a decade to harness
- these advancements in computing to bring you the most intelligent and
- trustworthy autopilot there is.
- Every Skydio drone uses its six navigation cameras to
- see and understand the world around it using computer vision and deep
- neural networks.
- That's how they're able to duck and dive through obstacles to capture
- Hollywood-style footage of our customers mountain biking or skiing.
- And 3D Scan builds on top of this with a groundbreaking AI for
- inspecting and understanding complex structures.
- So once you've set up your scan volume, as we saw from Alden, the drone will enter
- the exploration phase, where it will zip around the structure,
- and you can
- watch as it builds up a 3D mesh in real time.
- And the way it does this is it uses a set of deep neural networks
- to
- process all the imagery and then pass that data to a large
- nonlinear optimization problem which solves for the exact camera
- viewpoints and then incrementally updates the mesh.
- And this mesh is super key because that's how the drone creates the
- flight plan to capture the perfect dataset for any photogrammetry
- engine. And it does this just like a human pilot
- would, by
- studying the scene.
- So every flight plan is tailor-made to the specific structure
- you're inspecting.
- It's not a fixed pattern that's gonna miss the important bits or
- get stuck if there's a tree in the way.
- Once we have the flight plan, the drone will go into the inspection
- phase, where it
- will systematically capture every viewpoint with, well,
- robotic precision.
- You can imagine the drone is painting all of the mesh with close-up,
- high-resolution imagery.
- Even if you're a drone and a photogrammetry pro,
- it's near impossible to keep
- track of what you've imaged when we're talking about hours of flying
- and thousands
- of photos. With 3D Scan, it does it for you without
- missing a spot.
- So that's how 3D Scan is democratizing the creation of
- millimeter-scale digital twins of the world.
- Our incredible team at Skydio is working hard to bring you the state of
- the art in
- robotics and AI so that you can just hit go.
- And as we like to say, nothing flies like a Skydio.
- Let's get back to Alden and see how that scan went.
- [instrumental music]
- Now that our Skydio has autonomously landed on its case, if you leave the drone
- powered on, you can use your iPhone, iPad, or laptop to
- view the data we just collected.
- Our edge model viewer makes it possible to leverage the drone's onboard
- compute to view a 3D model of the scene you just scanned.
- Without any LTE connection, I can use this model as a map,
- selecting areas of interest, like these rocket engines we just scanned.
- The tool will then pull up all the photos associated with that point in space
- so I can inspect my job.
- You can do all of this without removing the SD card or uploading anything
- to the cloud.
- In combination with real-time AR coverage, you can be
- confident that you've captured all the data you need before you leave the job
- site.
- Once I'm good with that, I can export my geotagged images to
- the photogrammetry engine of my choice.
- Whether I'm handing that data off to a client,
- an inspection crew, or a jury, they can have confidence that they
- have the data they need.
- We've worked with the leaders in data processing software to ensure
- that we get good results when uploading 3D scan data to
- Bentley ContextCapture, DroneDeploy, or RealityCapture.
- But really, you can upload 3D scan data to any
- photogrammetry
- engine.
- Here's an example from the US Space and Rocket Center that we just scanned
- from our partners at Bentley.
- What really matters is how all of this comes together for
- customers.
- So here to help us understand how 3D Scan is already solving real-world problems
- is Dean Miller from Sundt Construction. Uh, Dean, thanks for joining us here.
- Can you start off by telling us a little bit about Sundt and the work that you do
- there?
- Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Adam.
- Sundt Construction is one of the largest 100% employee-owned
- construction companies
- in the US. We specialize in transportation,
- industrial
- projects, commercial building, renewable energy, and concrete.
- I'm a virtual design and construction engineer,
- and I'm also the
- enterprise drone program manager.
- So Sundt has built the reputation as having one of the best enterprise drone
- programs in the world. How did you get started and, uh,
- and where are you today?
- We started in 2013 with a DJI Phantom 2.
- Our worker would go out to the job site and he would take pictures and videos with
- his drones, and oftentimes his coworkers would tell
- him to get back to work and to
- stop playing with his toy. But the drone program has grown
- and now we're
- at 25 to 30 pilots with our program, and, um, we
- use them for three distinct phases of construction: business development,
- operations, and closeout. With business development,
- when Sundt decides to
- pursue a project, we'll send a pilot like myself out
- and we'll fly and create an
- orthomosaic map and a 3D model. This helps us get a better estimate
- of the, the bid of the work we're gonna do.
- During operations, we use that orthomosaic map to verify
- accuracy of underground utilities, and we use the model for our BIM
- coordination
- as well. With closeout of a project, we fly our
- thermal drone and capture the facade of the building or the equipment to check
- for energy loss. And we are taking 2021 to
- transition from manual drones over to Skydio autonomous drones.
- That's great to hear. Uh, we're, we're really excited
- and thankful to have Sundt as
- a customer. It's interesting common theme there
- that oftentimes enterprise drone
- programs start with just a hobbyist bringing one to work to play with it.
- Um, you guys have been amazing beta testers
- of, of 3D Scan.
- Can you talk us through some of the work that you've done so far?
- Yeah, absolutely. Sundt has taken the opportunity with
- Skydio 3D
- Scan to create very detailed 3D
- models of equipment that we have out in the field.
- Um, you know, with the construction industry as a whole,
- the
- work-related injuries have gone down, which is good, but
- work-related deaths have stayed the same.
- This is something that Sundt is looking to fix.
- Traditionally, we're getting these models using a,
- a laser scanner and a, a team of
- two guys. Um, and we'd have to go out and we'd have to shut down the equipment
- and,
- and clear the job site and put these guys in a potentially
- hazardous
- situation. And not to mention we're in Arizona,
- where it gets really hot really
- fast. We send our, our laser scanners out and it
- takes hours and we're constantly fighting with the heat of the day and
- the, the equipment malfunctioning.
- So to overcome this, we're using that, that Skydio to
- create these really detailed models, and it puts a drone in the place of these
- people, and we can effectively save somebody's
- life by not having
- them in that situation.
- It's pretty amazing to hear about the life-saving potential of drones.
- The other day you were showing me one of the 3D models
- that you generated with 3D
- Scan. It was pretty amazing stuff.
- Uh, maybe we could look at that now and you could talk us through it.
- Yeah, absolutely. This is a crystallizer water cooling tower
- from a semiconductor facility that we have in Chandler, Arizona.
- Um, it takes superheated water and it cools it all the
- way down to 200 degrees, which is still boiling,
- but it's much cooler than what it
- comes in at. Uh, this model was very easy to generate.
- It took me 30 minutes and I didn't have to shut down any
- equipment,
- costing in time and labor, and I didn't have to clear anybody out of
- the job site
- to do it.
- Yeah, that's a, that's a pretty amazing result.
- Uh, can you talk to us about the kind of
- impact you see 3D Scan having going
- forward?
- Three things come to mind, uh, moving forward, and that's faster, better,
- and safer. We can create these 3D models in a high
- amount of detail much faster than traditional means, and it also reduces
- the amount of rework we have to do, effectively, uh, saving
- 9% on our overall budget. Better, we're creating these incredible
- 3D models, um, that we can just use for the...
- The Skydio can go and get these. And safer, we're not having to put
- those people in inherently dangerous situations.
- Well, look, thanks for all the pioneering work
- that you're doing with this.
- Uh, we're looking forward to working with you
- to hopefully keep your construction
- site safer and, uh, and scaling around the world. Thanks,
- Dean.
- Absolutely. As us as well.
- [upbeat music]
- We'd like to extend a few thank yous. First, our launch partners.
- It's been great working with you to integrate 3D Scan into processing
- workflows. Second, the Space and Rocket Center.
- It's an inspiration being here with these iconic spacecraft.
- Skydio will be donating a fleet of drones to the Rocket Center's youth education
- programs. We look forward to working with you to
- help educate the next
- generation of aerospace engineers.
- Third, the Skydio team. Congratulations to everyone who made
- this product possible. We've accomplished a lot,
- but we're just getting started.
- Finally, Skydio customers, those in the early access program,
- and especially those who are already adopting 3D Scan.
- It's hugely motivating to see the results that you're generating.
- We plan to keep the features and capabilities coming.
- If you think 3D Scan can be useful for you, you can learn more and
- contact sales at
- skydio.com/3DScan. When you're ready to add it to your
- program, Alden's team will work with you at every
- step of the way to make
- sure you're successful.
- 3D Scan is available now. We can't wait to see what you do with
- it.
- [upbeat music]
Watch Time
23 Mins 39 Secs