Skydio Ascend ’25 keynote
That’s a wrap on Ascend 2025. Relive the keynote and see Skydio R10, F10, Shadow, multi-drone autonomy, and more revealed on stage. Witness the first-of-its-kind family of flying robots built to serve the most pressing needs of the industries our civilization runs on.
Highlights
Skydio R10 – For tight quarters and total confidence. R10 combines the ease, durability, and low operational cost of small consumer drones with the professional-grade features teams demand. Built-in lighting, communications, cloud integrations, and rugged reliability—everything needed to get the job done. Learn more
Skydio F10 – Coming soon. Extending coverage to dozens of miles, F10 enables long-distance missions, sustained response for extended incidents, and unmatched speed when every second matters. Learn more
One operator, multiple drones – Multiply productivity with the ability for a single operator to fly multiple drones independently across sites—all from a single browser. Learn more
Skydio Shadow – Keep subjects in view without pilot effort. Shadow maintains a reliable lock, manages distance, avoids obstacles, and instantly reacquires when line of sight is lost—day or night. Learn more
- Copy. Still no re-response from his beacon, over
- If someone's injured and we can't find them, seconds matter
- Helps us cut down on outages, wildfire detection
- I want people to feel safe in their communities.
- [beep]
- DFR 2, the area is clear.
- Roger, DFR 2.
- AEP Ohio installed its first drone docking station
- First of its kind program is taking flight
- And we're launching a new drone program
- Drones as first responders
- Watching from the roof of police headquarters
- They're not just going to outages, they're trying to prevent them
- We now can send a drone instead, capture the images that we need to see
- Automation missions planned out, flying our infrastructure
- When the emergency call comes in, every second counts The drone spotted him
- in the woods This life-saving technology
- Gearing up their drones with flotation devices
- Used to help save swimmers at sea
- Drones commonly used in the military.
- This one right here, called the Skydio, is our most popular one
- Unleashing American drone dominance
- Nothing has provided the level of confidence the X10 does
- On the ground!
- When he saw the drone, he knew he was caught
- Drone pilot got on scene, observed a guy holding a shotgun
- The DFR drone actually beat me there
- You could see his outline, and then you could see him moving.
- We're like, "Okay, we got him"
- Here they're using the drone to locate someone
- Hey, the drone has somebody running through the
- woods
- Flown it in rain, snow Through the day, through the night
- We're currently flying right now
- Has been super successful
- We're not waiting for the future of policing.
- We're building it
- Police say it is a game changer
- Sheriff calls the drones a game changer
- Game changer
- Game changer
- A game changer
- One of the most significant paradigm shifts I've seen in my career
- [clapping]
- Please welcome to the stage co-founder and CEO,
- Adam Bry.
- [clapping]
- Welcome to Dronehenge, everyone.
- This is such a special moment for drones.
- You can just see it and feel it. The way we use these things is
- fundamentally evolving, and it's having incredible positive
- impact.
- And this is such a g- special group of people.
- You all are the ones making it happen.
- Now, from a Skydio perspective,
- almost everything that's happening out there now is downstream from what we've
- announced on stage at Ascend.
- Two years ago, our first Ascend event, we launched the
- Skydio X10,
- and just to make sure that Night Sense worked,
- we flew it at my head in zero light
- on stage. Did work, and in the two years since,
- you guys have done incredible things with it.
- It's helped with storm response, it's fighting crime, it's inspecting our
- infrastructure, and it's helping to protect our soldiers
- and our allies
- around the world.
- One year ago, we launched the Dock for the X10,
- and this completed the
- story of autonomous, remotely operated drones.
- And just to prove that it could land in challenging
- conditions, we blasted it with
- 30 mile an hour winds and rain on stage. It worked again.
- In the year since, it started a paradigm shift in how drones
- are
- used.
- So I'm very proud of these products.
- I'm proud of the demos that we gave on stage to launch them.
- Uh, and boy, do we have some st- exciting stuff to show to you today.
- We've got a bunch of new products. We're gonna demonstrate all of it live
- on stage for you to see, so stay tuned to the end.
- Now, our core identity as a company, our mission, is building
- flying robots that give people superpowers, that give you and your
- organization superpowers, and we are very passionate about the
- technology. I'm probably not neutral on this,
- but I think this is the most fun,
- exciting stuff imaginable to get to work on, and we see a lot of that
- technology passion reflected in our customers.
- But our deep motivation starts with who we serve.
- We're fortunate to work with an incredible group of customers, spanning law
- enforcement, fire, energy, construction,
- transportation, and the US and allied militaries around the world.
- If we want to think about where the industry's going,
- I think it's helpful to take a little bit of a step back and think about where
- we've been, the evolving role that drones have played for
- civilization. So the classic drone that we make, these kind of
- small, electric quadcopters, these things really started off as kids'
- toys, and this is the world that I had come from.
- I grew up flying radio-controlled airplanes.
- It was super fun, uh, but it didn't really have any impact
- beyond those
- who flew 'em. These things were fun to get to fly,
- uh, but it was really just a hobby.
- Little over a decade ago, people realized that
- if you put a camera on these things,
- it's an incredibly powerful tool, and this first showed up for
- cinematography,
- capturing cool video, but it quickly spread to real-time
- situational awareness,
- infrastructure inspection, and so on.
- I kind of think of this as the tools era, where you can do useful stuff.
- It requires a skilled pilot there on site.
- So I always think the, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed, and if
- we want to know where we're going, we can look to what our most advanced
- customers are doing today.
- Docking station is here at the substation for the Clintonville and Linden
- neighborhoods. The drone is stored inside of this,
- and with it already
- being in the area, AEP Ohio is able to be looking at the
- outage spot within minutes
- We, the intent is that we identify the solution quick,
- and then at that
- point, the line crew's on site, ready to make the repair
- The docking station also allows them to pilot the drones remotely
- When there's trouble, with the c- click of a button,
- we're able to deploy the
- drone, uh, from here in, in headquarters in Gahanna
- So they're not just going to outages, they're trying to prevent them
- In the past year, we've found almost 300 instances where
- we've
- fixed an outage before it happened
- So it's all about keeping the lights on, which means going down less and getting
- back on faster, and AEP is transforming the way this is done
- with Dock Drones
- I think this is clearly an exciting time for drone as first responder.
- We really think of this as the year of DFR.
- One of our first DFR customers was Oklahoma City Police Department, and
- one of their first incidents was this: So a train operator called
- 911 in a panic, afraid that he might have hit somebody on the
- tracks.
- They launched the drone. They got there in a few seconds.
- They were able to see that unfortunately there
- was a homeless person asleep on the
- tracks, but because they could locate him so
- quickly with the drone, they were able
- to guide in first responders, got there, got him critical care, and
- saved this man's life.
- Incredible work by Oklahoma City Police and Fire.
- Another example, San Francisco Police Department.
- So San Francisco Police Department got a report of a stolen
- vehicle. They launched the drone.
- They're able to quickly locate the suspect from the air, and this
- gives the officers an incredible asymmetric advantage.
- They can follow him around.
- They know exactly where he is. They know exactly what he's doing.
- He stole the vehicle. Now he's going to steal some plates to put
- on his stolen
- vehicle. So this is bad news, right?
- This is the beginning likely of a serious crime spree.
- He's cold plating the vehicle,
- takes the new plates, puts them on.
- He very graciously holds up the new plates so that we can read them from the drone.
- [laughs]
- Doesn't know that he's being followed.
- I didn't know what was happening here.
- Some of you can probably predict it, but he's putting window tint on.
- So he's clearly stolen the vehicle.
- He's getting ready to go off and do some bad stuff.
- But because they're following with the drone, they know where he is,
- they know what
- he's doing, they can pick the time and the moment to intervene.
- So they sent a plainclothes unit, they rolled spike strips,
- put an end to this,
- took him into custody.
- Safer for everybody involved.
- Incredible work by San Francisco Police Department.
- So the core idea of drone as first responder,
- using drones to respond to critical
- incidents, get real-time situational awareness,
- extends beyond
- state and local law enforcement. So this is an example from the
- Blue Grass Army Depot.
- We deal with all kinds of serious security incidents on base.
- This is a training exercise for an active shooter situation.
- So they're practicing here using drones to get them in the air quickly as part of
- the physical security group, get real-time awareness, uh,
- and resolve the, the
- situation faster and safer.
- What's the common thread between all of these?
- So in all these instances, we've got a Dock drone
- that can be flown fully
- autonomously or operated remotely.
- It's a fundamental difference from the old way of using drones.
- It used to be you send a person out there, they've got the controller, they launch
- it, they fly it. That's fine, but this is just a step change in
- efficiency and impact. So when we were thinking about, like, what
- concept, what word captures this, we realized
- that the inspiration was right there in front of us with the
- industries that we
- serve:
- infrastructure. Definition of infrastructure:
- the basic physical and
- organizational structures and facilities, buildings, roads, power
- supplies needed for the operation of a society or
- enterprise.
- So I think we're fun- entering a fundamentally new era where
- drones themselves
- become critical physical infrastructure.
- And the impact and importance is going to be off the charts compared to
- what we've
- seen previously.
- This ties to the founding bet when we made it s-
- when we started Skydio 12
- years ago. I can't say that we perfectly predicted the future,
- but we had a deep
- belief that if you could make these things smart enough to fly themselves, they'd
- be useful to more people in more places.
- And for the last seven years, we've been laser-focused on bringing Dock
- and remote
- operations to life. We didn't do it all at once.
- We did it incrementally.
- We built the vehicles, we b- built the connectivity, we built the Dock,
- and now
- we've gotten to the place where all this stuff is working together in your hands.
- It's been incredibly gratifying for us to see it scale up.
- So all of these are active X10 Dock locations now, and there's
- hundreds more right around the com- corner coming.
- One of the things that's most exciting is looking at the data that we're getting
- from our early usage. So early results show that
- Dock-based X10s are flying four to five X as much
- as, as conventional X10s. Conventional X10s
- were already being flown a lot,
- but Dock just removes all the friction from getting these things in the air,
- which
- is exactly why we built it.
- And what this means is we're getting a lot of flights.
- So we like to do the historical comparisons here.
- This is our first generation of products, Skydio 2 and
- X2. And when we launched X10, starting from the date of first shipment,
- it blew it out of the water. And Dock and X10 are now blowing this out of the
- water.
- So we're fortunate to work with an incredible group of customers
- across a wide range of industries all over the country.
- One of the true pioneers that we've had the fortune to work with
- over the last two
- years is the New York City Police Department.
- This is the biggest, most complex city in America,
- and they've done
- incredible pioneering work to stand up a totally game-changing drone
- as first responder program. But their vision, the city's vision,
- goes beyond law enforcement. They were early in realizing that
- these same drones that can be used to respond to 911 calls
- and other emergencies
- can be used for all kinds of different opportunities across the city.
- And I'm very excited today to have New York City's Chief Technology Officer,
- Matthew Fraser, join me here on stage to tell you a little
- bit about what they're
- up to. So please welcome Matthew. [upbeat music]
- Skydio casual. I like it.
- Yeah.
- Uh, so from our very first meeting, it was clear
- that, that you all saw the potential of this.
- Obviously, law enforcement is incredibly impactful, uh, but it
- was clear that you
- guys had a vision, uh, beyond that.
- I'd love to hear kind of where that came from.
- Can you share with folks, like, how did this idea start for you guys?
- Yeah. So when you look at the modern era
- and you look at how technology's evolved
- almost every industry, look at the medical industry,
- look at the transportation
- industry, look at what Uber has done for public
- transport for people.
- So when we look at technology, we try to look at it from the lens of how
- can it
- help the masses, what's the utility behind it, and how
- and what areas are
- we critically underserved today?
- So when we looked at drones, uh, from the public safety perspective, the
- outcomes, the, the use cases are very easy to see. It was, it
- was good...
- It's, it's a very good use of the technology.
- But outside of that, think about how many other industries,
- how many other
- service lines the city represents, where we have challenges where we need
- someone to go out and check something, report back, and then we take an action.
- So when I think about that, I think about stuff like our buildings
- department.
- The New York City De- the New York City Department of Buildings
- is one of the
- largest safety regulatory agencies across the entire US.
- There's over a million buildings in New York, and they're responsible for ensuring
- that the code and safety of those buildings are up to, up to par.
- So imagine having a facade-related issue where we have debris falling
- because of the external side of the building hasn't been properly maintained,
- and you want to assess the extent of the damage.
- So instead of having a buildings inspector coming out from the street level, taking
- a look up, going up as high as they can within the
- facade, taking a look out the
- window, looking at what the facade looks like,
- having a drone being able to survey
- the building in real time and tell us what's happening.
- Think about what we do around after-hours work.
- You have jobs that, uh, job sites that have construction
- activity after permitted hours. Instead of sending a building inspector
- out
- to take a look at that job, having a drone
- go and do a flyover to see if we see equipment moving on the job site
- to show us
- that that activity is there, and then being able to have higher quality
- and
- faster levels of enforcement behind that type of activity.
- So when we looked at drones, we said the use cases for this
- is much bigger than
- just the public safety space, and if we only invest for one
- vertical, we'll lose the opportunity to capture
- everything else that we can do
- within the city.
- So what we decided to do is have a citywide drone program.
- So we looked at the geography of the city, we looked at how we could break it up
- and how we could get drone coverage in almost every space, and we've been
- partnering with Skydio and working on rolling
- that out throughout the city.
- So now whether we have a construction-related incident,
- whether we have an
- emergency-related incident related to public safety or something like a build-
- building collapse, or whether you need to do a survey of some
- other
- underground structure or above ground structure,
- being able to have the
- utility of using those same devices that we put out for the public good for
- public
- safety be used to help in all those other areas.
- It's fantastic stuff. So we've started to hear this idea
- percolate a little bit in
- other places of having drones become city infrastructure or county infrastructure.
- Do you have any, any kind of advice or thoughts for other city leaders
- or public
- safety leaders out there that might be thinking about this?
- Yeah. So I, I think as you look at investing in these
- types of
- technologies, and you look at where you...
- look to where you position your drones, take a look across every service
- line that you, that you run, whether that's the engineering and
- operations side, whether that's buildings, whether that's water infrastructure,
- whether that's public utility infrastructure,
- and take a look at wherever you have
- a person that goes out to do any manual level of survey
- externally around a facade or anything around the stability of a
- building or
- anything along that lines, and use that as an opportunity
- as you're doing the use case around whatever your initial use case is.
- Build pilot use cases in each one of those areas so that you can prove the value.
- So it's always hard to justify why are we going to invest in this and
- why is that go-- And how is that going to pay the city back in, in the
- future? When we look at it from a New York City
- perspective, faster
- times to inspect
- buildings, faster times to exprect, uh, inspect roadways,
- faster times to inspect bridges and other types of infrastructure,
- and the safety-related conditions that those things can bring, the
- cost will return itself tenfold very quickly if you look at it
- through that lens.
- Awesome. Well, thank you, Matt. Thanks for joining us here today.
- Happy to be here. Thank you.
- [audience cheering]
- One of the implications of this, if drones themselves
- are going to become physical
- infrastructure, the national security stakes are going up.
- These are network-connected flying autonomous robots.
- But the national sec- security stakes have already been super
- high.
- It's crystal clear at this point that drones are the fundamental
- critical tool on the modern battlefield, and the Department of
- War is now fully changing the game.
- We've been working with the Army for the last six, seven years, and we have never
- seen the pace, intensity, excitement of deploying these tools
- to our soldiers. I'm very excited and proud that Skydio is a part of
- the Army Short Range Reconnaissance Tron Two program to get soldiers the
- capability that we need, and we see serve- serving both our military and
- our civilian customers as a critical national security imperative.
- So when we started Skydio,
- we've always built our drones in-house in the United States.
- And when we started doing this in twenty sixteen, people thought we were insane.
- The conventional wisdom at the time was like, "You gotta go to China.
- That's where all consumer electronics are manufactured.
- You'll never be able to do it in the US." Uh, we always felt these things are
- aerospace devices. In the aerospace world, manufacturing and design end up pretty
- closely coupled. And over the last nearly ten years,
- we've built up
- phenomenal manufacturing capacity right here in the US, which has now become a
- critical strategic advantage for us as a company, and I think a cr- critical
- strategic advantage for us as a country.
- The other implication, if we're building physical
- infrastructure, is that reliability is the single most important
- feature. You can have great capability, but if it's not accessible when you need
- it, it doesn't really matter.
- I will note that the sun is now coming out. The fog is burning off.
- Uh, if you don't have a hat, I think we have some extra hats in the
- back.
- I tested this myself yesterday. The hats make a big difference.
- Get the bill down.
- It's-- The sun's at the perfect angle.
- So
- maybe if we have some Skydio people, we can, like,
- we can literally pass the hat
- Building really good, reliable drones is a phenomenal technical challenge.
- I think it's kind of deceptive because they're so small, people think it might be
- easy, but the level of technical complexity
- is really on par with building a
- self-driving car, building a rocket ship, uh, and it's
- actually harder making it smaller.
- Like, in engineering, oftentimes the way
- that you solve tricky problems is by
- adding mass or taking up space. In a drone, we're packing a huge amount of
- technology into a very, very small package.
- Uh, I think there's really two keys to
- achieving high reliability on these systems.
- The first is controlling the entire technology stack, and we are a full stack
- company. So we design the drone, we design the dock, we manufacture these
- things ourselves in-house. We also write all the software
- that runs on the drone
- and software in the cloud that manages all of this.
- And I can tell you from hard-earned experience that oftentimes what it takes
- to fix
- a tricky issue is tweaking all of these things.
- We'll make a subtle software change, we'll tweak the design, we'll change the
- manufacturing process. All of that stuff together is critical for
- making these systems work the way that we want to.
- The other ingredient, though, is just real-world experience.
- There's no substitute for getting out there and flying in challenging
- conditions and learning the hard lessons that come from more and more data.
- Uh, and we are fortunate now to have a lot of
- data.
- So our online vehicles, basically those serving our civilian
- customers that report
- analytics up to the cloud, have done two point six million flights.
- The actual number is probably double this because a lot of our drones are going to,
- to offline military uses. Uh, we're now getting close to a billion
- analytics events per day, and we've got over four petabytes of log
- data. A lot of this is data that we've generated ourselves.
- Some of it is data that customers have voluntarily shared
- back with us, and all of
- this is being used continuously to improve the system.
- Now, I want to continue what will be an ongoing
- tradition here at
- Ascend, which is sharing openly some of the
- biggest reliability issues that we've
- had over the last year. Talk a little bit why we think that's
- important.
- So the first one is this.
- Now, this is going to look familiar to some of
- you out there in the audience.
- Internally, we call this the red LEDs of death
- or the white LEDs of death.
- Uh, and basically what would happen is if you're flying X10, you would see these
- LEDs show up, the drone would disconnect.
- Now, fortunately, in the vast majority of scenarios,
- it will safely, autonomously
- return to home, land itself, but it still kills the mission.
- It's an unacceptably bad user experience.
- I want to talk about what's going on here.
- So we obviously do a lot of RF testing before we ship a device.
- We do all kinds of different exposure, different chambers,
- but we missed something,
- and unfortunately, we missed something, uh, that is near and dear for many of our
- customers. Uh, so that is a police radio, and it turns out
- that the power and frequency that that thing operates at,
- if you hold it just on
- the left side of the controller, where many of our customers have their
- radios
- mounted, it interferes with the signal, and in extreme
- cases, it can actually damage the controller
- and brick it.
- So here we're looking at the backside of our controller. It's kind of opened up.
- Um,
- we've done a bunch of things to address this.
- So the first is just shielding the power cable, uh, where the signal is getting
- picked up and amplified. We've redesigned the battery circuit,
- and a lot of this
- can actually be improved in software.
- So all of these fixes are rolling out now, uh, and they
- have, uh, a huge impact. They basically fix ninety-one percent of
- the issues, and
- thirty-three percent of it can be fixed through software alone,
- which obviously all
- of our customers will get, uh, without ev-having to get new hardware.
- Second reliability issue, propellers.
- So all Skydio customers over the last year have gotten these notice to
- operators advising to ins-inspect your propellers, watch out for
- propeller wear. If you see the propeller hub worn out,
- you need to replace
- it. Today, I want to share what's been going on
- behind the scenes.
- So we do a ton of reliability testing before we ship these things.
- We shake them, we vibrate them, we bake them, we freeze them,
- and we tested
- the crap out of the propulsion system too.
- We did hundreds of cycles, hundreds of hours on individual units in
- all
- kinds of extreme conditions.
- By the time we shipped, we'd accumulated over two thousand hours
- of real flight
- data on, on our X10 fleet. Uh, but after we shipped,
- one of our, uh, one of our wireless testers had a crash
- out in the desert.
- So this guy's name is Frank Testa, perfect name.
- Uh, he lives in, he lives in the desert. He tests the wireless system.
- So basically all day long, he just flies out and back at max speed
- to stress the wireless system.
- So we started to investigate this. We looked into the data.
- Um, so here we're looking at distance traveled
- versus total flight hours
- for our entire X10 fleet. Each of these dots is a drone.
- Uh, this is kind of like the upper bound for
- the, the majority of the distribution,
- and this is Frank's vehicle 'cause all he was doing was, like, max speed back and
- forth all day long. When we investigated, we found this.
- So there's a steel hub. There's-- or there's a steel propeller shaft.
- There's an aluminum hub. Those things were grinding at prolonged
- exposure at max speed.
- [machine whirring] So the first thing we needed to do is find a way to replicate
- it, so we built this thing we call the
- Windstorm.
- So it mounts the drone at a specific angle, cycles the propulsion system, and
- then applies a ton of external velocity to really torture it.
- So using the Windstorm setup, we were able to replicate the issue,
- and s- once we can replicate it, we can study it, we can try to fix it.
- So here's our original design. We started playing around with more
- materials and
- more geometries, and this was a very tricky problem 'cause we
- couldn't change the,
- the motor or the shaft design. We, you know, you guys have the, the drones.
- We can't ask you to install new motors. We can only change the propeller design.
- So we tried a first set of designs. We tried more designs.
- We tried more designs.
- It really turned into a true m-material science problem.
- Uh, but we did find... Our team did amazing work here.
- We found a recipe that worked. We basically found
- that a more compliant propeller
- hub material with better geometry offered a thirty-five X improvement in
- durability in the most extreme flight conditions with a,
- with the drone maximally
- loaded.
- And many of you already have new propeller sets.
- Those that don't will be getting at least one free set, uh, by mid-November.
- But there was a time issue here. It took us a long time internally to find
- a fix that we found to be acceptable that offered the durability improvement
- that
- we needed. So our first NTO Uh, these are notice to operators.
- Key thing for us is once we find an issue, we're going to tell you about it.
- Went out in May 2024. Um, and in the intervening time between that
- first NTO and when we had the fix, we proactively contacted
- customers to replace 240 propeller sets.
- And because of that, the issue was 98% contained
- before we had the root cause technical fix. So how did we do that?
- Well,
- once we understood what was going on, we built an analytics model
- that enabled us
- to look at our fleet data and figure out any drone that somebody
- was flying that
- was getting anywhere close to the risk profile, and our customer support would
- proactively contact any vehicle that we thought was at risk to warn them
- and have
- them replace the pel- propellers.
- And while we were doing this, we also built it into the product.
- So the drone itself can obviously track its flight time, and we built UI into the
- controller and remote flight deck so that you would know to do this.
- So I think the, the overall punchline here is
- that data and software maturity,
- combined with close collaboration with you all, enabled us to contain this
- issue. And I think that's a story that's going
- to, going to continue.
- Now,
- why am I p- here on stage? This is the biggest stage
- that we get as a company, our
- most important event of the year, and I'm talking about stuff
- that we messed up.
- There's a couple reasons for this. One, we are accountable to you.
- Reliability is the most important feature, and I want everybody here to know that
- we view it that way. When we mess up, we're going to talk about it,
- we're going to
- share it, we're going to fix it, we're going to improve it.
- But the second reason
- is a little bit broader. I think transparency
- is actually foundational to safety
- reliability in aviation. The more that we talk about this stuff
- transparently, the
- smarter we can all be, the better judgment we can exercise,
- the better decisions we
- can make. Uh, and we're taking the next step on
- that today.
- So I'm very excited to announce that starting today, we're going to have a
- public-facing reliability dashboard where we publish our internal
- reliab- reliability metrics. So we scrutinize this stuff immensely
- internally. We're going to start sharing it with the
- world.
- So I'm going to give you a quick overview of what's in there.
- So the overall thing that we're focused on
- is what we call the flight
- incident rate, which I think is aviation and marketing speak for a
- crash. Uh, [laughing]
- somebody on our marketing team just winced back there. I can see Macario.
- From here on, we'll just call it flight incident rate.
- Uh, so this is the, this is the actual data.
- So this is rolling data for the last 90 days.
- Um, and then we're going to break it down into
- the constituent components.
- So the first, and this is obviously what we're most focused on,
- is technical
- malfunctions. So these are things like the prop hub failure
- that we talked about.
- But we also count, and this is setting an extremely high bar for
- ourselves, any
- failure of the collision avoidance sy- system, we are counting as a technical
- malfunction. So any little thin wire, thin branch that the drone clips, we
- count that against ourselves. Now, fortunately,
- the collision avoidance system is
- really good, and it works really well most of the
- times.
- This is an actual customer flight, uh, where it's returning
- home, weaving its way through everything in its
- way.
- If this had crashed, we would account this as a technical
- malfunction.
- That's the bar that we're setting for ourselves.
- But there's other things that go into this as well.
- So there's environmental factors. Uh, bird strikes happen.
- You know, we have enough data now that we see this on a monthly basis.
- Uh, we've had drones get intentionally shot
- at.
- We, we could call that a human factor. We call it an environmental factor.
- Uh, you could fly in icing conditions.
- Then there are true human factors.
- Um, so these are things where basically the
- drone was being operated outside of our
- recommended design procedures. Now, we know these things
- are operated in stressful
- situations. Oftentimes people are exercising judgment,
- knowingly taking risks.
- You know, somebody might choose to turn off obstacle
- avoidance, resulting in a
- crash. Uh, we also view this as our responsibility,
- and we're continually
- trying to improve the product such so that it's less and less likely for these
- human factor issues to happen. But the trend is very strong.
- Because we're so focused on this, we just see it month over month,
- release over
- release, we are making progress. You also start to see,
- I don't think we have
- enough data to fully claim this, but you start to see some seasonality
- there.
- It looks like summer flying is a little safer.
- Winter flying is a little bit more dangerous.
- There's less flying in the winter, which means we're more sensitive, but the
- environmental conditions are also harder.
- There's more thin branches without leaves on them, things like this.
- The other key thing that we're tracking is dock landing reliability.
- We're currently at 99.6. So this means you do 1,000 flights,
- somewhere between
- three and four of them might land outside the dock.
- I want to be clear, these are not crashes. We have the safe landing spot.
- The drone will just go there and land.
- We really want to get to three nines of reliability. We're cranking away at it.
- I think we're pretty close.
- From a broader perspective, all aviation entails some level of risk,
- whether you're
- flying an X10, a helicopter, a commercial jet.
- Anytime something takes off, you know, the n- the entropy is trying to bring you
- down to the ground, and so it takes a lot of technology to
- keep things in the
- air.
- There's two ways that you can, you can break this down into two
- components.
- So we think of risk as sort of the combination of the likelihood,
- how probable
- is it that something's going to go wrong, and then the severity.
- If something does go wrong, how bad is it going to be?
- So we looked high and low, and we really couldn't find any rigorous
- data sets out
- there for small UAS. We believe that we are the first company to really
- rigorously
- track this stuff. And small UAS are going to have a higher incident
- rate. These things are flown low to the ground where more
- things can go wrong.
- And because they're small and light, there isn't as much room for redundant
- systems. But the size and weight trade-off
- is more than worth it because the
- severity is very, very low compared to manned aviation.
- And if you multiply these things two together, the punchline is that X10
- is super
- safe. It's way safer than putting a helicopter
- in the air, which is oftentimes the
- alternative for our customers.
- One of the levers on severity, if we want to keep driving this down, is
- kinetic energy. It's a combination of mass and velocity.
- So this is why we developed the parachute.
- Parachute reduces the kinetic energy, uh, by an order of magnitude.
- Deploys, keeps everybody on the ground safer.
- Um, I don't know about you, but I, I'm not used to thinking in terms of
- joules, so
- to make this a little bit more, uh, perhaps understandable,
- it's the difference
- between getting hit by a baseball going over 150 miles an hour to one going 36
- miles an hour. Uh, and it's worth noting here
- that a bigger drone falling
- from 300 feet would be equivalent to getting hit by a 360
- mile an hour baseball, which I don't think anybody wants to sign
- up for.
- And it's really important to keep this in mind.
- Size, mass, velocity, these things are
- bad. We just wanted to demonstrate that kinetic energy is bad.
- [laughing] So it's still a new product, uh,
- but parachute has already had three successful deployment recoveries.
- Uh-
- We're not rooting for this number to be higher, but we are glad that it's out
- there.
- And with parachute,
- uh, the risk is reduced by another order of
- magnitude.
- We're having to make some inferences here because we don't have as much data as the
- whole history of commercial aviation.
- Uh, but w- commercial aviation is the gold standard of aviation safety,
- and we
- believe that with parachute on a per flight hour basis, X10, uh,
- is safer than, than everything else out there.
- The other good news is that dock-based flights, again early data,
- are looking three
- X safer than controller-based flights.
- And overall, X10 is now four X safer than
- when we launched it, and
- the vast majority of this is coming through software improvements
- that are
- available to, to all of our customers.
- So we've got
- greatly imp- improved reliability. What about capability?
- Well, there's different dimensions to
- capability.
- If you're flying from a dock, launch time really matters,
- connectivity is obviously
- critical, charge speed matters. It matters a lot in docks.
- Top speed, flight time, we're trying to optimize all this stuff.
- So we'll start with flight time.
- Our Gen 2 battery has significantly increased capacity.
- So we got out of China, and we got a win in terms of capacity.
- But in order to use that capacity, you need to have a really good model of
- it.
- You obviously don't want to return home too late, so you need to model out exactly
- how the battery's going to behave in different situations.
- We've put a ton of time into this. We've also then optimized our flight
- control
- system so it can squeeze every last drop out of the battery.
- Um, we're improving the onboard estimation,
- so that we know the local weather
- conditions, which is another key, uh, ingredient in getting more, more, uh,
- endurance out of these things. Um, and then we're also continually just
- optimizing how the drone uses its own power systems.
- And the net result of this is during daytime operating conditions
- with upcoming
- software improvements w- on Gen 2 batteries,
- we're expecting roughly a
- three-minute improvement, uh, in average flight conditions.
- Night sense, flying at night and active illumination
- is going to use more power,
- but we've done a t- ton of optimization there,
- and we think unlocked an additional
- seven minutes of flight time.
- Airspeed, another critical ingredient.
- So the max airspeed of X10 has always been forty-five miles an hour, but the
- max obst- obstacle avoidance speed was thirty-six miles an hour.
- And if you look at the data, basically nobody's flying faster than
- thirty-six miles
- an hour, which makes sense because people want to
- have obstacle avoidance on.
- We have now done the work to bring obstacle avoidance to forty-five miles an
- hour.
- There's a ton of science behind this to make the calibration system be able to see
- obstacles far enough away so that we can fly at higher speeds.
- And then because we know if we unlock that, people
- are going to spend a lot of time
- flying at higher speeds, we're doing a ton of reliability testing
- on fully loaded
- X10s to make sure they can stand up to this.
- So this will also be coming in an upcoming software release.
- So Gen 1 dock takes about thirty-six minutes to go from zero to eighty percent
- state of charge. We've got a Gen 2 coming soon that'll take
- that down to,
- to twenty-five minutes, so it's a thirty percent increase in
- charge time.
- This will come with all new docks but will also be a free upgrade as part of
- our
- normal annual maintenance for all docks that are already out there.
- And this might sound like not that big of a deal,
- but it's actually a huge deal.
- If you think of about a fleet of dozens of docks, increasing the charge
- speed by thirty percent is a huge increase in the capacity of
- what that overall system can do.
- Connectivity. So we've got our point-to-point radio,
- Connect
- SL. We're bringing adaptive channel switching.
- So this doesn't happen that often, but if somebody happens to turn on and drive
- interference on the channel that you're operating on,
- it's a terrible experience.
- So this will dramatically improve the worst twenty percent of
- flights. Um, but we think the real key to robust
- connectivity is having
- multiple links. So we've got Connect SL, which is our point-to-point link.
- Uh, but this is, you know, this is great if you're flying close to the
- base
- station. Uh, we think 5G, especially in urban and su- urban
- environments, is a key ingredient, which is why we built 5G into the drone.
- But now with Fusion Plus, you can have two onboard 5G modems, and
- Fusion Plus brings all of this together.
- Uh, it's a huge step up in robustness.
- It's also a huge step up in the max that you can get because it's additive.
- It's both redundant and additive.
- Fusion Plus at the operating system level can send data over multiple links.
- This works on T-Mobile, Wireless Priority Service, AT&T, FirstNet,
- Verizon, and in Japan, KDDI and NTT.
- So with Fusion and Fusion Plus, we're seeing a thirty-eight percent
- improvement in
- the robustness of the link. Uh, the other piece is obviously the quality
- of the
- video that you can get. So as you would expect,
- Connect SL falls off with range.
- Fusion brings that up to, to pretty much a, a pretty good flat line,
- and
- Fusion Plus is a huge step up on top of this.
- Time to launch. This is probably the number one thing
- that we've heard about,
- especially from our DFR customers, and we want to get into the air faster.
- So right now there's three or four things that have to happen,
- some in the cloud,
- some on the drone. They kind of happen in series.
- We've now optimized all of them, scrunched them down in parallel.
- So we're going from twenty-five or thirty seconds down to ten seconds.
- So we've got two X faster launch,
- thirty-eight percent more robust connectivity,
- thirty percent faster charging,
- twenty-five percent higher top speed, ten percent longer flight time,
- bunch of other software improvements. It's basically a whole new X10.
- Gen 2 comes with all of this, uh, but almost everything
- applies to Gen 1 as well through software improvements.
- And this is kind of a core philosophy for us.
- We're not trying to sell a new piece of hardware every year.
- We're trying to continually invest in the platform, make it better, more useful
- for you guys.
- Precision mapping is one of a, one of the well-established drone use
- cases, and
- this is one honestly where we're a little bit late to the party.
- Lots of folks have been doing this across construction, transportation, uh,
- surveying. Uh, I'm very excited to share that X10 is now
- high-precision capable. So we've got the RTK attachment, uh,
- and we've also done
- the software work to un- unlock the necessary mapping flows.
- The big question was always rolling shutter.
- At le-- Raise your hand if you were concerned about rolling shutter on
- X10.
- At least a couple of hands went up there.
- So for those that don't know, and I can't blame you, basically every
- camera in the world exposes line by line.
- It doesn't read out the whole frame at once.
- It exposes line by line, and it happens very quickly.
- But if the drone is moving, you end up with this effect where you get
- skew in the
- image. The drone translates over time.
- It's not all captured at a single instant, and that results in skew.
- But if you're good at math, and we have some folks at Skydio who
- are great at math,
- you can fix it. So you basically precisely estimate the
- motion of the drone during
- the capture period. You need to know how far away the thing
- you're looking at is,
- and you can unwarp it. And you can see this very clearly at the
- data.
- So here we're comparing A test we did with RTK but no rolling shutter
- correction to having rolling shutter correction. Lower is better here.
- This is centimeters of error. Uh, so it, it basically
- perfectly corrects for the motion.
- Um, and we're comparing it to other competing
- products out here.
- We're not claiming that we're the best, and there's a bunch of different ways that
- you can test this, uh, but we are well below sort of the survey grade
- bar that
- we expect, that most of our customers expect.
- Most importantly, we're hearing this from you.
- So same accuracy as a Phantom 4 RTK in a third of the time,
- sub-inch results in many scenarios. It's very exciting to see this.
- It's more exciting, I would say, to see this happening from docks.
- So Turner Construction has been doing awesome work here to have these RTK drones
- installed on their construction site to just be con- continually flying and
- operating in the background. They're gonna have an information station
- later today,
- which I highly recommend everybody go check out.
- So the capture is part of the story, but it doesn't exist in a
- vacuum. You need kind of the complete workflow,
- and we're also working with
- industry leaders like DroneDeploy, Pix4D, Propeller, Esri,
- Trimble, and more to deliver the end-to-end
- precision
- mapping workflow.
- So this was always part of the big thesis on X10, that we're gonna build a bunch of
- attachments and accessories to unlock more and more capability over time.
- We're gonna keep building more as we see need in the market and, uh, one
- of the most common requests that we got was for
- something like this.
- [audience cheering] The dropper.
- [audience applauding] So this, this was
- a, a huge ask from public safety, to be able to drop a rescue to somebody in
- need,
- maybe Narcan, maybe a battery, whatever the situation demands.
- And today, we're introducing our interface control
- document.
- So this is a public-facing standard interface that anybody can use.
- So if we don't make the attachment that you want, you can use the ICD
- to develop it yourself.
- So
- we've got 4X reliability.
- We've massively expanded the capability, mostly through software and attachments.
- What about operational efficiency?
- So we think the key metric here is really how many useful flight hours
- are you
- getting for every person hour you invest.
- Uh, we love to study things with data, so we've actually built a simulation
- environment for drone as first responder, but you could do this for other
- applications as well. So it's very data-driven.
- This is a data set from Clark County, so Las Vegas Metro Police Department,
- 500,000 calls for service in the data set, and you can basically simulate the
- impact of having different number of dr- drones.
- So on the right, you're seeing a map of possible
- deployments.
- Each of those red dots is a hive of three docks.
- On the left, you're seeing a response time curve.
- So what percentage of calls are we getting th- to and how quickly
- are we getting to
- them? So you can see with 15 docks, pretty good story.
- We could respond to maybe the most important 10 to 20% of calls.
- The more docks you add, the story gets better.
- Forty-four, we're getting to more faster.
- A hundred and sixty-eight, better again, more faster.
- Uh, you know, we're, we're in the business of making
- and selling drones, but I
- think in most situations, more drones is gonna be better.
- How are we gonna staff this? So if you have 15 docked drones, if
- you needed a one-to-one ratio between people and drones,
- you would need 15 people
- in an op center flying these things.
- And I would say with 15 people, it maybe seems plausible that you can do
- that. At 44, it doesn't look so appealing.
- At 168, it's kind of outrageous, right?
- You'd need like a whole gymnasium full of folks flying drones remotely.
- Uh, and this is just not the way that it should work.
- Uh, we see this very practically. Oftentimes with our customers,
- the number one
- barrier to starting a drone program is finding the people to staff it, and for
- sure, at scale, the number one cost of the program
- is gonna be, be the people to
- run it. And y- you know, the drone should work for us.
- It shouldn't be the other way around.
- Yeah, yeah.
- The answer is AI and autonomy.
- Okay.
- So we started to notice basically every DFR flight is some combination of knowing
- where to go, getting to the scene as quickly as you
- can.
- Typically, you're looking for a suspect
- and once you find him, you want to track
- him to maintain situational awareness.
- All of these things can be improved by technology.
- So the key to knowing where to go is integrations.
- Axon has been a great partner. They're already a, a leader in
- license plate reading technology with their, their cameras that go in cars, the
- fleet cameras. We're very excited to see them-
- Okay
- ... now entering the fixed ALPR space. We'll have a very tight integration there.
- Um, but there's a lot of innovation happening
- in the 911 tech space.
- So Prepare 911 is doing great work to, to get real-time
- intelligence, AI transcription, and so on.
- RapidSOS is processing the majority of the 911 calls that happen in the
- country. They've got real-time telemetry on calls,
- both 911 calls and other
- emergencies that are happening. We've got a great integration with
- RapidSOS.
- Uh, and there's a whole ecosystem.
- Our commitment here is we'll integrate with anybody that's got
- useful data that you
- guys are using, where it'd be useful to get it into DFR
- Command.
- Doesn't matter if we might have some competitive overlap.
- We want to do what's right for you and get the data you need into the system
- to
- respond quickly.
- Um, once we know where to go, this is why we created Skydio Pathfinder.
- So there could be airspace regulations. There could be buildings in the way.
- There could be terrain. We use AI to figure out the best path
- through all this
- stuff, uh, and fly there autonomously.
- This is a real video flying through the urban canyon.
- Uh, Pathfinder makes it super easy, and the beauty of it
- is once you click that
- button, you don't need to be paying attention to
- or flying that drone.
- Today, I'm very excited to announce Skydio
- Shadow.
- So we have historically been really good at subject tracking in kind of the
- cinea- cinematography consumer world.
- We're now bringing that to bear on kind of the public safety
- use case.
- Uh, and then we're also investing in
- multi-drone operations.
- So extending our UI through modularity so you can fly and manage multiple
- drones, and adding capabilities like on-station
- relief.
- So if a drone is flying and it runs out of battery...
- There's gonna be drones going off all day. Pay attention to me, not the drone.
- [audience laughing] You'll, you'll know when you're supposed to look
- at the drone.
- [laughs] They, drones are just doing useful stuff in the
- background
- constantly. Uh,
- now it's time to look at the drone. So the best way to understand this stuff-
- ...
- is, uh, is really just to see it in action.
- So we're gonna go to our Seascape real-time information center
- here live on stage. We've got Officer Deepu John,
- Officer Ryan Blinn.
- You will see what they see up on screen here, and they're gonna
- fly and operate these drones. So, uh, let's see what we got.
- Hey, Ryan. I'm getting calls of a suspicious tech CEO
- throwing
- T-shirts at audience members during a keynote.
- I'm gonna launch a drone to keep an eye on him.
- All right.
- All right. Sounds good. I guess that gives you something to do since it's
- been so
- quiet.
- Somebody snitched on me. Uh, so this drone is now locked onto me using
- Skydio Shadow. So if I run over here,
- it's gonna follow. I guess I'm busted. My T-shirt throwing days are over.
- All right. I've got an ALPR hit from an Axon Outpost
- for a stolen vehicle heading
- south on Sumner. I'm not sure where this dro- uh,
- where this car is, so I got a
- drone outbound to go find it.
- Clear. Let me know if you need some assistance.
- All right, copy.
- So we had an incident, uh, reported by Axon Outpost,
- maybe a stolen vehicle, so we
- have a second drone in the air. Uh, we're up there surveilling the
- area and, uh ...
- All right. I'm on scene. I see, uh ... I got a possible in sight.
- I'm gonna use Shadow to track this vehicle.
- Clear.
- So you just mouse over the car, the icon appears, you click it, and that
- drone is now locked on and autonomously following.
- And you can see both the live video of what's happening, you can also see the
- telemetry projected onto the map.
- So you get the green icon for where the car is, you can see the position of the
- drone, and all the data for your city would be
- projected here, so officer
- body camera locations, dock locations, all the assets, everything you
- need to know to manage and take care of the situation.
- All right. Now we're getting a 911 call. You jinxed it, man.
- Looks like all hell's breaking loose at Seascape.
- Seascape 911. Where's your emergency?
- I'm at the Seascape Resort.
- Seascape Resort?
- Yes. Seascape Resort, the hotel. I'm at the Skydio Ascend conference.
- And what's going on there?
- I saw a person wearing a black jacket breaking into guest rooms.
- They pried one door open and went through a room.
- Now they're trying to open another door.
- Yeah, my bad. I'm gonna go ahead and send, uh, all four to this.
- All right, copy. I also got a rapid SOS hit in the
- neighborhood too.
- I'm sending two drones out there to check that out.
- Looks like we're missing lunch.
- So when this stuff is all working the way it should,
- sending four drones should be
- just as easy as sending one. Seascape is a large property.
- Who knows where the suspect is? Let's send four drones and,
- and stake out every
- corner.
- You can see the UI here. We've got a single operator managing
- multiple
- drones. They can see the map, they can see the live video feed from
- everything
- that's flying, all managed. We, we'll get eight drones in the air here
- managed by just two people on stage, and we have the FAA's
- permission to do this.
- [laughs]
- Common question, but this is the direction the industry's going.
- The FAA knows it, and autonomy, uh, makes it safe and
- reliable for one person to manage multiple drones.
- All right. Looks like this tech CEO call
- is unnecessary.
- It was called in by another jealous CEO. I got an idea who that might be.
- [laughs]
- Was it Rick?
- I have units on scene for the other, uh, other calls too.
- Uh, they're, they're calling it all off, so I'm gonna RTH my drones now.
- So when they're done, all they have to do, they can stop the mission at any
- time, they can click Return, and the drones will use Pathfinder.
- The same way that they u- u- autonomously flew there,
- they'll autonomously
- return to home
- and, uh, and safely land back in the docks.
- Yeah, looks like we have a subject in custody on
- mine.
- I'm gonna go ahead and return.
- All right. Copy that. You got the watch. I'm going to meal.
- Looks like our emergency over here at Seascape is also taken care of.
- We, we all just need to get used to having
- drones flying all the time.
- This is like ... It's a little window into the future.
- In fact, we need to get so used to it that I'm just gonna go on with the
- keynote.
- Let's, uh,
- let's roll on to the next slide here.
- So when we think about, like, where we are and where it's going,
- historically ... All right. I will wait for it to land.
- So I think there, there's actually a lot you can learn from
- video games.
- Historically, flying a drone was a little bit like playing a
- first-person view
- video game. You're kind of, like, in the character, you're responsible for
- low-level control, you're guiding the thing around,
- telling it what to do.
- If you know what you're doing and you're paying attention,
- you can do some amazing
- stuff. Uh, but the reason that we built all this is that
- we want it to be more
- ...
- [cheering] All right.
- Yeah. Rou- round of applause for the robots
- and the people.
- Thank you, guys.
- So the reason that we built all this stuff is we want operating drones to be a
- little bit more like playing a strategy game, where you're o- thinking and
- operating at a higher level, you've got multiple assets, you can send
- however many that you need. You're sort of in the position of making
- key judgments,
- but you're not down there guiding one, one individual drone around.
- Um, we're fortunate to work with a lot of
- great customers, and one of
- the pioneers that's leaned heavily into drones as first responder
- technology is the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.
- I'm, uh, I'm very excited to be joined on stage now
- by their assistant sheriff,
- Dory Koren, to tell you a little bit about what
- they're doing in Vegas.
- [upbeat music]
- All right.
- Thanks, Adam. Appreciate the introduction, and thank you for the opportunity to be
- here. We're very excited about our drone
- program, and more broadly,
- about the way that we're using technology to reshape how we fight crime and
- terrorism in Las Vegas. I want to just share five key
- concepts that serve as a foundation for our program, but
- also our approach to technology right now as a whole.
- First, probably most importantly, when we look at drones in Las Vegas, we're
- looking at it very simply: how can this help us save lives?
- That's what the public cares about at the end of the day.
- When they think law enforcement, they think violent calls,
- and they want to make
- sure that they can get an officer there fast enough to be able to help them, and
- ideally, if they're in danger, to prevent that danger
- or address the threat.
- If you go back 100 years ago and you look at the very
- first patrol car that was created, it was designed to try to make patrol
- response faster. Because in reality,
- time most oftentimes is the difference between life and death.
- How fast can we respond when someone calls for help, and how fast
- can we interdict when there's a threat?
- The interesting thing is, you know, we've come a long way since the first
- patrol
- car, you know, over 100 years ago. We've-- now the patrol cars are much faster,
- more reliable, more advanced. But the real leap forward is not on
- the ground anymore, it's in the air, as all of you all know very well.
- What we're looking at now is using drones as a ve- to be able to
- ex-expedite our response. And in Las Vegas,
- and as I'm sure you're seeing in a lot
- of your cities, is we're be a-- we're able to respond within 90 seconds or
- less. And as Adam pointed out, with Skydio's goals to
- continue to improve, continue to enhance things,
- that timeline's gonna shrink and
- shrink to the point where we're up there in truly seconds to be able to
- have a police presence. That's a game changer for us,
- and ultimately that means
- faster intel, it means better officer safety, it means
- ultimately lives saved.
- Now, second concept for us is
- our drone program is called Project Blue Sky, and like it was mentioned
- earlier, we approach this as an infrastructure
- investment.
- Sorry, a little interference there.
- We approach this as an infrastructure investment.
- So less than looking at it as tools to give our
- officers to work in their environment, instead we want to change the environment.
- It's been talked about this morning.
- And it's that kind of vision that really allows us to create a path not
- just for police drones, but for all kinds of drones
- that will definitely come down
- the road in all kinds of industries.
- So in Las Vegas, we have about 75 drones in our fleet.
- The vast majority are the Skydio X10 Docked drone, and
- that's just the beginning. But our approach is to build a citywide
- infrastructure where these drones are pre-positioned on top of, right now,
- police
- and fire stations, but ultimately that will expand, so
- that way we can get to that
- first point of saving lives faster.
- Now, the technology is only half the equation.
- The other half for us is also looking at the human component,
- the
- police officer, the role of the police officer,
- which has evolved drastically,
- uh, and it's continuing to evolve now with
- these technologies.
- But if you think about it, you know, the role of a police officer or the
- effectiveness of policing for the longest time was all about how many
- cops can I put out in the field? In fact, most law enforcement executives or heads
- of agencies, that's what they fight for.
- It's the ratio of police officers to amount of people in the community.
- Well, the reality is that is changing now a little bit too.
- We'll always-- we're always gonna need cops to be able to
- kick in a door to take k-
- some kind of physical action, but at least our philosophy,
- dating back to
- as early as 2017, is one cop
- behind a keyboard connected to the right technologies can be
- more effective than three cops in the field at times.
- And it's this approach that's kind of s-showing us
- how useful the drones are with, let's say, the remote pilots now that we have.
- That's the start of the shift, and ultimately it's gonna get to the point
- where
- ideally our police presence in the community is gonna be amplified
- significantly by the, the amount of drones we have,
- the amount of pilots we have.
- Ultimately, I think one pilot can have eyes on
- multiple calls, can provide
- intel much faster, and ultimately can extend the presence of
- our, our police
- presence in the community substantially.
- Now, that brings up my fourth point real quick,
- which is having
- guardrails in place. Sorry, I skipped a slide there,
- but having guardrails in
- place from the beginning.
- Make no mistake, our program in Las Vegas, your program wherever you
- are, all of it is dependent on us doing this
- right and making sure we maintain
- public trust and transparency and accountability.
- I cannot emphasize that enough. Th- these cannot be add-ons to a
- program. They can't be afterthoughts.
- They have to be baked into the foundation, and they have to be strengthened as we
- continue to evolve in these technologies.
- Because that, it just takes one court order
- or one law to change, and
- ultimately the entire program now stalls, if not fails.
- So it's critically important for us to really think about having our safeguards
- in
- place and being proactive and self-limiting.
- Don't get so excited by the technology that it may be able to do so much more
- than
- what you want it to do, um, because at the end of the day,
- we want to make sure
- that we-- we're empowered by the public, that we only do what the pu- what the
- public expects us to do. So privacy, civil rights, civil liberties,
- this cannot be
- an afterthought in these kind of conversations.
- The last thing is this guy. So we look at this from a
- big picture perspective, and this is meant as a joke,
- but at the end of the day, we
- look at this is not just about police drones.
- We're looking at reshaping the way that basically aircrafts
- are operating in the
- sky. And ultimately, it starts with police drones, similar to
- the way two-way radios started, where we kind of pioneered the way there
- and then
- now you see two-way radios used in a variety of industries.
- But if we do it right,
- and it's an immense opportunity, but it's immense responsibility,
- if we do it
- right, where there's safeguards in place, we mitigate the risks.
- As Adam pointed out, there's a variety of aircrafts,
- and at the end of the day, all
- of this has to operate safely. Then what we're doing
- is we're paving the way for
- the public to not only expect and
- appreciate police drones and then potentially delivery drones
- and maybe air taxis and potentially even these guys showing up
- at some point.
- So at the end of the day, it's all about preparation
- and really paving the way for
- our airspace. Uh, but with that I will say, Adam,
- it's an opportunity.
- Thank you for being here, and the partnership we have with Skydio
- is really paving
- the way for us to succeed on all levels. Thank you.
- All right. Thank you, Sheriff Fleuring. [audience applauding] Maybe one last note.
- So th- there's always, you know, regulatory's always a question.
- You were talking about airspace. I understand that you guys had some real
- breakthroughs on that front. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about
- that.
- Sure. So I know that the, you know, this conference, one of the big things is
- breaking news, and so we have two pieces.
- One is last week we were very fortunate, we were first in the country to be able
- to get, uh, basically tailored airspace, where we're able to fly beyond visual line
- of si-sight in some of our zero grid.
- That is a game changer for Las Vegas, part of the change in how we're doing with
- using this as infrastructure. So the Las Vegas Strip
- is right by the airport, so
- being able... [audience applauding] Thank you
- I will say with the applaud, I just got to say the team here, you know,
- Lieutenant
- Saggiomo and Steve Oscar and the whole team here,
- they're the ones from Vegas have
- been working hard on that with your folks in Skydio,
- so tremendous work and
- partnership. But even break-- more breaking news, that was last week,
- which
- apparently is old news already. So as of yesterday, late yesterday,
- we just got of
- our approval, again, first in the nation, to basically fly four-to-one
- operations. So we'll have one pilot-
- Woo! [audience cheering]
- Thank you.
- So in short, one pilot will be operating four drones,
- four of our Dock
- drones at any given time, uh, starting now.
- So-
- Awesome
- ... thanks, Adam.
- Thank you.
- Appreciate it.
- [upbeat music]
- All right. So our goal is to do an awesome job of the
- drone stuff. We are drone people. We know our place in the world.
- We're focused on making the Dock, the drone, the software to manage it,
- totally
- awesome. Uh, but we realize that that is not the complete story.
- We talked about integrations before.
- Uh, when we look out at the market in public
- safety, we see a lot of
- Axon. Uh, it's an incredible company.
- They've done incredible work over the last 30 years.
- They're now the global leader in public safety technology.
- So when we were thinking about partnerships and where we really want to
- invest, uh,
- and we want to plug that sort of drone spoke into the right
- hub, we're
- very, very excited to be working with Axon on
- this to deliver the complete
- end-to-end DFR solution. Uh, and I'm excited now to have the president
- of
- Axon, Josh Isner, join us to share a little bit about what
- they're up to.
- [upbeat music]
- All right, everybody. Nice to see you today,
- and big thank you to Adam and the
- Skydio team for having us out here and for their partnership over the
- years. It's been a lot of fun to be, uh, partnered with such a talented and
- mission-driven group of individuals.
- Uh, speaking of mission, when we come to work at Axon,
- our mission is to protect
- life, and this is our goal. This is why we show up every day.
- Our goal is, uh, and we call it the moonshot goal,
- we're looking to cut
- deaths between the police and the public by 50% within the decade.
- And we're looking to do so by deploying
- innovative technological tools to police officers that they can deploy
- in high-stress situations and lead to safer outcomes within
- communities and protect the lives of all of our brave men and
- women in public safety. And as we talk about this, we refer
- to it as the Axon ecosystem, and we break it down as
- follows. First, we've got a group of products that
- are really
- built around observing and detecting.
- And here we're talking about everything from fixed cameras to body
- cameras, uh, to counter-drone and drone awareness tools,
- to ALPR, automated license plate recognition,
- as well as
- another, or a, a number of other software and sen-
- or pieces of, uh,
- hardware and, uh, combined with software and sensors
- that lead to
- just awareness of what's going on.
- And then the second tranche of Axon products is around
- communicating and acting, the things you use during the incident.
- And that could be anything from our Respond platform, which
- is how you live stream
- your videos back to the RTCC, to our FUSIS
- product, which allows you to see all of your, uh,
- sensors on a map and
- tap into the video feeds, to things like the Taser
- and ground robots and, of
- course, uh, the Skydio drone.
- And then lastly, the least exciting, uh, part of the
- workflow for all of our customers is the idea of reporting and
- investigating all of the administrative work that happens after
- the incident has taken place. Things like entering data into your
- records
- management system, uh, redacting and reviewing and sharing your f-
- your, uh, digital evidence on evidence.com
- and using tools,
- uh, that, uh, uh, deploy AI, such as DraftOne, which writes
- about 90% of the first draft of the police report for you, uh,
- such that you can pick up a lot of time in the thing that, uh, police officers are
- very taxed doing, which is writing police reports.
- And as we looked at the Axon network as a whole, we started to see
- that the idea of observing and detecting and
- communicating and acting fit really closely together.
- And the more synergistic we can make those products, the more closely they work
- together, the better outcomes you'll see in the
- field.
- And this is kind of how we think about that, and we talk about winning the first
- 120 seconds, because that's about how long it takes
- today for an incident to happen to a response
- being on the way, because someone has to call 911,
- and then there is a CAD
- entry, and then finally you're able to deploy
- technology.
- And this is a long time. I mean, people say getting tased,
- it takes five seconds.
- It's takes an eternity. Imagine that for 120 seconds.
- It takes a long time to do this. And if we can condense that
- timeframe into more like 30 seconds, the outcome will
- be safer communities and more lives saved.
- And one real, uh, one, one real life
- way we can show that, and, um, uh, Adam talked
- about it, uh, briefly, was the idea that you can go
- from a license plate being dete- detected to a drone in the sky
- without a human being in the middle of that equation.
- And so the more we can take out the human and put the technology
- in place to make it very, very efficient for a camera to pick up a
- license
- plate read or for a camera to even detect a crime in the future and
- automatically send a drone in the sky, have eyes on the
- scene, and give you more situati- situational awareness faster, that is the
- outcome that we think takes this entire workflow and turns it into
- a 30-second or less workflow. So that's really what we're working on in
- partnership with Skydio right now, and we think this whole DFR program,
- as it becomes more automated, will continue to have better
- and better outcomes in
- the field. And the last thing I'll say is-
- At Axon, we use a term a lot called joining forces,
- and it's one of our values.
- And what it means is we're really big on the idea of people working together
- to achieve an outcome. And for us, everything starts with people.
- We try to build the most talented team we can internally, and they
- drive incredible innovation and great results for our customers, and
- it goes downstream to our customers.
- We're so excited to work with the men and women of public safety every day.
- And it also goes downstream to our partners.
- And when we were looking to get into the drone hardware space, one of the
- biggest considerations for us was: What's the team we're
- gonna bet on here? Because this was a couple years ago, drones were still
- very, very, very early on. So nobody was saying, "Hey, this is what
- the thing is gonna be for the next five to 10 years." They're saying, "This is the
- first version of the thing that's gonna be something so much more capable and
- flexible and powerful over that time." And we bet on the team we
- thought could deliver that, and it started with Adam, uh, who is an
- incredible founder, a very talented guy, and he's built such a talented
- organization here that's not only mission driven, but acts with
- integrity and ethics and is rigorous in driving
- real-life outcomes for our US customer base.
- And so as we thought just two years ago about what team we wanna partner with,
- we'd encourage you to think about the same lines or think along the same lines.
- Because when you bet on the most talented team, you get the best
- long-term results, and I'm sure that is what Skydio is gonna drive
- for everybody here. So thank you very much, and stay safe,
- and have a great rest of
- the day. Thanks.
- [audience applauding]
- Thank you.
- So drone as first responder is typically about managing a lot of
- incidents in kind of a geographically contained area.
- And we know obviously that multi-drone operations can be useful
- for that.
- Uh, but managing critical infrastructure
- is oftentimes about
- managing a lot of assets distributed across an entire state, an entire
- region, in some cases distributed across the
- country or the world.
- And we think multi-drone has the potential to be at least as, if not
- more, impactful in these kinds of scenarios.
- Uh, so to help show you what that looks like, we're now gonna ...
- We're gonna go from the Seascape real-time information center to our local
- fictional energy utility,
- uh, Clearview Power. So we're now in the Clearview Power op
- center here
- with Corey, one of our op specialists who we hired
- away from Southern Company.
- Thank you, Southern Company. Sorry. Uh, and, uh, let's see what we got Corey.
- Thanks, Adam. So right now I'm supervising multiple
- simultaneous drone operations all over the country.
- You can see here in multi-drone view we've got three missions running, one at a
- solar plant in Colorado, one at a training substation in
- California, and a distribution inspection in Texas.
- We're gonna take a closer look at Colorado.
- This drone-
- I wanna ... If I could interrupt, Corey. I just wanna point out this is live.
- So there are three drones in the air flying right now all over the US
- being managed right here from Seascape.
- Thanks, Adam. So this drone is autonomously inspecting a solar plant,
- and we've got thermal imaging enabled, and we can immediately identify potential
- issues like overheating panels, cells out, cell level defects or
- strings out. Now we're gonna go over to California.
- Uh, this drone's performing a live inspection
- at a training substation in a
- busy area. Even though these missions are autonomous, I can pause them at any
- point.
- And I'm gonna fly over and get a quick look at a gauge on this,
- uh,
- temperature gauge on this transformer.
- Cool. Uh, I see on the map though that there's a
- major event happening at this resort called Seascape near my
- training substation. Looks like it's attracted a crowd of over
- 500
- people. Just in case, I'm gonna go take a look
- and make sure they're all
- staying in their event and there aren't any security concerns.
- All right. Cool. Uh, looks like-
- I told you it was live.
- Yeah, you, you can wave at the drone.
- Uh [laughs] looks like it's a great event and well contained.
- I don't see any reason for concern here.
- And, uh, I'll let the drone get back to finishing
- its mission.
- [phone ringing] Oh, I'm getting a call from the control
- center. Hold on a second.
- Hey, Corey. It's Christina. Listen, I'm with the Ohio Customer
- Reliability Team, and we're seeing an increase of momentary
- operations on
- breaker G1392. Can you fly the breaker zone from
- the Griffin substation to the first recloser?
- That's where the fault location is showing.
- I need the results no later than Friday.
- Okay. Got it. I'll have something for you this
- afternoon.
- Feel free to follow along on RediLink.
- Thanks, Corey.
- Cool. So I just got a call from our Ohio
- Customer Reliability Team.
- Normally this would take days to plan, schedule, and fly, but with the new
- asset-based inspection feature, I can plan and fly that mission in
- minutes. My assets are already imported directly from our
- system of
- record. I can plan now just by searching for
- feeder
- Golf 1392 instead of manually thinking of where to fly.
- I can assign pre-built shot sheets that define exactly what data's
- needed, whether it's a simple top-down shot
- or a full quadrant
- capture for detailed analysis. And I know this line, and based on today's
- call, I'm gonna add a couple of poles to the
- south.
- Uh, as I select these poles, the route is automatically
- updated, accounting for the geo fences we've
- created here, which keeps us from
- flying over to businesses. This looks good.
- Uh, I'm gonna go ahead and save this mission,
- and we're gonna get this mission started.
- On Skydio Cloud, I can run any mission from across my whole
- fleet, like in the United States. While the drone is getting ready to
- launch, my
- other missions are continuing. Let me check on another asset-based
- inspection
- planned earlier in Texas.
- The interesting thing about this facility is that the closest responders
- I have are two hours away, so this was a really good spot for a dock.
- Today's mission is for wildfire mitigation,
- and it's running on a schedule to be
- flown daily. That gives us a quick look in case an
- ignition event
- occurs and the ability to monitor everyday progress in our maintenance and
- vegetation management pro- programs.
- Uh, and as you see here, this mission was planned with, uh, asset-based
- inspection. We just uploaded the, uh, the, the data
- into cloud, and it's been filtered for poles,
- so you don't see any
- lines here, but, uh, drone's doing pretty good.
- Uh, so, so Ohio's up and running. We're gonna move there, um,
- and we're taking off in an energized substation, uh, near Columbus, Ohio.
- Um, and we're transiting over, uh, all the energized equipment and
- moving to the first waypoint. This was the mission we just planned and,
- uh, and we're executing it. Check out that view.
- Back to you, Adam.
- Sweet.
- So just, just to double tap on what happened there,
- we have all the asset locations in the cloud. All you need to do ...
- Yeah, round of applause for Cory. Yeah.
- [audience applauding]
- You basically got your assets at your fingertip.
- You just say what you want to look at, how you want to look at it.
- We automatically plan and execute the mission.
- Uh, so we owe AEP Ohio a huge thanks for that.
- For one, those were their docks that they were flying,
- so thank you to the AEP Ohio
- team, uh, for letting us use them.
- [audience applauding] Um, and we're lucky now to have Jake Reed,
- project manager principal from AEP Ohio, to join us on stage and talk a little
- bit about, uh, docks and drones and where all this is going.
- [upbeat music]
- Welcome, Jake. So
- AEP has been a phenomenal, uh, adopter of, of drone technology, and we've
- really seen you guys lean into to docks as well.
- I'd love to hear a little bit about why that is.
- Like, what excites you about, about docks, and how do you see that fitting into
- your vision?
- Yeah, we've really kind of scaled out our
- manually flown drones over the last
- couple of years. Um, so I think the natural progression here
- is to get to the
- dock-based drones and be able to, um, kind of
- react a lot faster. We've, we've been able to be very proactive
- instead of
- reactive in, in recent times.
- That's great. Uh, so the, the other reason we need to thank you for
- that is that
- AEP was one of the major inspirations for us in building the asset-based inspection
- capability. I mean, I think you guys kind of got an early look
- and, and expressed a
- lot of excitement. Um, so I'd love to hear about, you know,
- why that is.
- Like, why is that concept of having the assets
- in the cloud and being able to plan
- and manage at that level appealing?
- Yeah, you know, being able to, uh, create a mission within pretty much
- seconds, whether it's five poles, 20 poles, and then being able to, to
- get that, that drone out there quicker, responding to outages perhaps,
- or just doing a, a basic inspection, I think it can really save us some time.
- Awesome. All right. Well, thank you, Jake.
- All right, thanks. [audience applauding]
- [upbeat music]
- So I'm gonna spend a little bit more time on this because I think it's, it's such a
- powerful concept. So the way this works, you know, most folks are gonna have a list
- of all their assets, the locations, the description in, uh, in your
- system. You can put that into Skydio Cloud.
- If you have a risk management system, you could use that to automatically
- generate
- missions. That generates an automatic inspection,
- but I think the real
- power of this is the feedback loops.
- So once that drone is out there flying, you can use the drone flight data to
- improve the location of the assets. Oftentimes you don't have them perfectly.
- They change over time. A crew might go out and install something,
- move something.
- So the drones can actually help you create that digital twin, and then if you
- process the data and see an incident, that can get fed back into the risk
- management system and generate more automated missions.
- And the goal of all of this is just to put the assets at your
- fingertips. So we think this is gonna be super powerful for energy
- utilities, uh,
- but really I think it applies to all critical infrastructure.
- Anywhere you've got a physical thing, a building,
- an apparatus where you care about
- the state and health of that thing, you can create a digital twin of it in the
- cloud and use the drone to keep that thing up to date, which
- is gonna be ways out
- safer, faster, more efficient to maintain it.
- Uh, so we've talked about a lot of good news
- on X10 today.
- We keep getting better at it. We keep investing more in it,
- making it a better
- platform, more capable. Uh, the one bit of bad news,
- which I do also want to be
- transparent about, is that, uh, demand is, is growing very, very
- quickly. Uh, and we are, uh, trying to catch up on supply,
- but it's gonna take us
- a little bit of a minute. I know that, uh, not everybody is getting their drones as
- quickly as they would like right now.
- Our team is working overtime, uh, but, uh, but it ...
- We are gonna be, uh, behind for a, a little while longer.
- So our core identity, our mission as a company
- is building flying
- robots that give you superpowers, and we believe the X10 class of
- system, these quadcopters that are small enough to basically take
- anywhere, but
- versatile enough to serve a bunch of different missions, this is the workhorse
- platform and this is what we are focused on.
- We're gonna stay focused on it.
- We're gonna keep investing in it. Uh, we're gonna keep making it better,
- both the
- X10 and its successors. Uh, but it is not the only
- class of system that matters.
- On August 2nd of 2024, um,
- deputies in my sector responded to a, a disturbance.
- We needed to perform a wellbeing check on a subject inside of a
- mobile home trailer. We, we called for more units.
- We attempted to contact at the front door.
- There was no answer at the house. We,
- we came to the decision that we needed to enter the house.
- So much criteria
- that
- added up to a reason to go in there and for there to be a higher level
- of expectation of force being needed.
- There were no other resources available at that point. There ...
- I, I was not able to deploy a K9, couldn't call a SWAT team,
- but there was something about entering that house that, that made us all a little
- uneasy.
- Um,
- myself and four other deputies entered the house.
- We were met by heavy gunfire.
- Uh, I was inside that home when we took fire.
- We lost a deputy at that point. He was hit.
- Another deputy was hit in the arm and evacuated, and the rest of us
- were able to escape safely from that house.
- Another SWAT team, uh, quick response team entered to
- try and save the deputy that got shot and ultimately died.
- They did it without knowing what was in there
- So some of the most dangerous work in public safety
- happens indoors, and I think this actually extends to other
- sectors as
- well. This is definitely a job for the robots,
- and
- we're not the first ones to notice that you could have an indoor drone.
- In fact, some of our consumer products have been
- used in an indoor capacity.
- Uh, and there are a lot of interesting
- products out there.
- I think it's a noble mission. We applaud everybody who's building
- products to try
- to serve this use case. There's a great diversity of, of unique
- capabilities out there in the ecosystem in the market.
- Uh, but when we look at what seems to be most
- popular, we see a
- lot of consumer FPV drones. These things show up all the
- time in tactical situations. Um,
- this is not what this drone was designed to do.
- I mean, it was basically designed for hobbyists to
- fly around and have a cool
- experience, capture cool video. Uh, but, uh, by and
- large, we're seeing it being used in all kinds of
- tactical situations, and I think
- this really deserves a lot of attention. Why is that? Well, it's small.
- It's pretty easy to use. It's pretty durable.
- It's got a pretty low replacement cost.
- Uh, and oftentimes when folks are choosing between the consumer product
- that wasn't
- built for it at all or the more specialized products,
- they're picking the consumer
- product. Uh, but the consumer product comes with all
- kinds of trade- trade-offs.
- You have to hack it just to get the very basics.
- I mean, people, like, try to strap lights to these things.
- Streaming, uh, is a total pain in the butt.
- You've got to hack the hardware.
- You've got to fire up, uh, a screen sharing app.
- So the question that we've been asking ourselves is, is it possible to get the
- best of both worlds? Can we take the goodness of the consumer
- product,
- but build in all the stuff that's needed for professional
- indoor use? We think the answer to that question is yes, and
- today we're very excited to launch and intro- introduce to
- you the Skydio R10.
- [cheers]
- We need the indoor situational awareness to be able to save lives.
- On the power generation side, a big concern is
- that we're saving somebody from
- harm's way.
- If officers don't know what they're walking into, it puts them in a, in a very
- precarious or critical position. If they could see, well,
- that changes everything.
- I want to be able to fire the drone up and go.
- Snelling Narcotics, unit 5317.
- Performance.
- Members of the 18th Street gang.
- I want onboard lights built in. I don't want to have to buy accessories.
- I don't want to have to MacGyver things together.
- Not every patrol officer has the time or the ability or the skill level to go
- out there and learn how to fly an FPV drone.
- You could perch something like that on a countertop
- and start a negotiation through
- the drone.
- The ability to communicate back and forth with the suspect is a big deal.
- Down on the ground, hands out where I can see them.
- One bump on the wall and your lighting's gone,
- and then it might lose
- GPS, so you might not even be able to get it
- back. So durability is a big deal.
- Having a clear signal is critical because
- if I can soft search the
- house and then relay back to that team that's going to come in,
- then they
- know what to expect in real time and can focus on the scene.
- If our operators don't have a live stream of the video, then we're
- dependent on using just a radio. And again, it's always better to
- see what you're going to face or the structure you're going to enter
- rather than
- hear a description over the radio.
- If we had remote operations in an indoor drone, we could have someone simply
- turn it on and then pass off control to remote pilots and support the
- tactical teams in real time.
- I envision being able to see all of my fleet drones in
- one platform.
- If you had one platform that flew a couple different
- drones, that makes training and teaching so much easier.
- I don't like to necessarily just say that it's only for indoor use.
- The same drone that could be used for indoor can also be used for confined
- spaces.
- When I think of close proximity drones, I of course think of the form factor
- to be able to fit into a multitude of confined spaces.
- It should be capable enough for most scenarios because the primary goal is
- safety.
- Success for us is that everybody that deployed on the mission goes
- home safely.
- The equipment can be replaced, but people just can't be replaced.
- We're there to protect the community, so the safer we can do it and with more
- tools, the better.
- [cheers]
- All right, so as you have probably noticed,
- we love live demos during
- keynotes. Uh, so I've got Zach here, who led the development of
- R10, and we're going to show you some of its
- capabilities live right here
- on stage.
- So some of you may have noticed that we have this kind of sketchy
- mobile office over here. It looks kind of out of place.
- It's not a container.
- Uh, so we figured we'd use the R10 to go
- and check that out.
- So all Zach has to do is just push forward on the stick.
- The AI collision avoidance will navigate through impossibly small gaps.
- Uh, and this looks like a bad omen.
- This, uh, this might be a mobile meth office
- or something.
- And oh,
- that is, that is definitely bad news.
- Looks like Walt- Walter White is in here cooking something up for us.
- Uh, so there's a dark corridor in the back
- there.
- So Zach's going to turn on the lights. It'll illuminate its own way.
- It's got built-in night sense, and it can safely fly its way back
- through there super easily. Again, all he has to do is push the stick
- forward.
- He goes back there, and we've got some kind of creepy
- mannequin. Uh, doesn't look like there's a threat.
- Maybe this is an overdose situation.
- Uh,
- nobody seems to be in danger. If this was a real situation, at this point Zach
- could put his controller down. So you can see his hands
- are off the stick.
- That drone has now been commandeered and is being flown remotely through
- remote flight deck. So we had an X10 in the air we didn't even
- tell you.
- You can see the X10 stream there. But the same pilot that was flying
- that X10
- remotely is now flying the R10. This is uniquely enabled by the connectivity
- and the onboard AI and autonomy.
- So Zach's gonna take control back here on stage.
- Easy to hand control back and forth like that.
- Um, one of the other features that we know is super important
- is the ability
- to perch. So perch extends the battery life up to
- hours,
- so very easy to perch R10. Uh, and because it's got a
- built-in speaker, I could hear it on stage.
- We want you to hear it, so we're gonna get R10 mic'd up here.
- Uh, and I'm just gonna have a little
- conversation with it. How did you do that R10?
- That was amazing.
- I am an artificially intelligent system.
- The R10 Series has a perfect operational record.
- I also have a built-in speaker and microphone so we can have this
- conversation.
- All right, that's kind of a creepy voice, R10.
- Uh, but I guess in the spirit of the voice
- I'll ask you, can you go ahead and open,
- open the pod bay doors, R10?
- I'm sorry, Adam, I'm afraid I can't do that.
- You haven't built me a dock
- ...
- yet.
- All right. [audience cheering] R10.
- So I think the answer to the question can we get the best of both in one platform
- is definitively next.
- Yes. The next question we asked ourselves is,
- how much did it cost?
- So when we look out at the market today, uh, there's a range of prices out there,
- but a lot of these specialized indoor enterprise dr- drones are pretty pricey.
- We see numbers like 15 to $25,000 per year.
- Um, we have a lot of respect for the other
- products out there on the market, but I
- would put R10 head-to-head against any of them.
- Uh, so should we charge that much for R10? No.
- There's a couple reasons. Uh, one,
- we want you to have zero hesitation about putting this thing in harm's way, and if
- it's too expensive, we hear this all the time from folks
- flying other indoor
- drones, they're worried about risking the drone.
- We don't want any of that fear with R10.
- But two, we really want to make indoor operations
- broadly accessible.
- We want these things in the hands of every single patrol officer so that even those
- officers out on patrol by themselves don't have to en- enter a dangerous sit-
- situation and put themselves at risk.
- So our standard bundle is gonna be the R10 patrol kit.
- It'll come with the drone, the controller, the case, three batteries,
- everything you need to get in the air, and all of that
- for less than $6,000 for the hardware.
- [audience applauding] From a software standpoint, we're putting everything in
- this thing. So DPR command, which means live streaming,
- automatic evidence upload, remote flight deck, the works, and all of
- that is just 3,600 a year.
- So next question, what if you break it? You don't wanna ...
- You know, you don't wanna have to buy a whole new
- drone.
- So the first thing is that we have designed this thing to be
- super
- durable, and I'm gonna prove it to you.
- So
- it's supposed to land upside down. I will fix that.
- We'll do another drop test here.
- So we've got turtle mode. [drone whirring] So it can flip itself
- right back
- over. It's still flight worthy,
- I think.
- [drone whirring] Still flies. No issue.
- But
- unfortunately, taking a tumble is not the worst thing that
- can happen to an indoor tactical drone.
- [drone crashing] Would you believe we can still fly that thing?
- I'm kidding, it's totally wrecked.
- Uh- [audience laughing] But, but
- we thought of this. So,
- uh,
- every drone comes with a replacement plan.
- All I have to do, I'll take the battery out.
- It'll come with this nice pre-labeled box.
- We pop the drone in there.
- You send it back to us.
- We will send you a refurbished and repaired R10
- and, uh, you're right back in the game.
- [audience applauding]
- So the way this works is you crash it once, send it back to us.
- The first replacement is free as part of the software
- subscription.
- After that, it's just 500 bucks per unlimited.
- We never want you to worry about sending the drone into harm's way.
- [audience applauding] If you don't wa- ...
- If, and if you don't wanna wait for the mail,
- uh, you can get the team kit, which basically comes with a built-in
- spare right in
- the box. Same software subscription price.
- This basically gives you, uh, two, so you have a spare built in ready to
- go. You can send a busted one back, uh, we'll send you a new one.
- So we really believe this is gonna be a transformative tool for
- indoor
- operations in public safety. Uh, we also think it's gonna be
- incredibly powerful for critical infrastructure inspection.
- There's all kinds of situations where you need to send a person into some kind of
- terrible confined space up in some nook and cranny to get an accurate
- view. I knew there was a reason we had some space there in
- the front.
- Uh, so we thought we'd do some live critical
- infrastructure inspection for
- you. Uh, so this is a piece of
- infrastructure I'm standing on, our stage.
- We're gonna do a little inspection here just in case we need to roll something
- heavy up here. Um, and this is an impossible mission.
- Look at how tight those gaps are. And again, all Zach has to do
- is push the stick
- forward, and the AI and autonomy system flies
- that thing through.
- It's dark, it's dusty, it's lighting its own
- way. No problem. This is an impossible mission made
- easy thanks to the R10 and Skydio's collision avoidance system.
- That's nuts.
- [audience cheering] Yeah, round of applause for the robot,
- and especially round of
- applause for the team that built it.
- [audience applauding] All right.
- So it's gonna be a great tool for public safety.
- It's gonna be a great tool for inspections.
- It's in early access starting next month, and it'll be generally available in the
- first half of next year. We expect these things to go like
- hotcakes, so if you are
- interested, get your pre-order in now.
- All right.
- [audience applauding] [cheering]
- That's R10.
- So now we've got an amazing indoor drone.
- We can pair it with the X10, which is great for outdoors, also
- great for citywide coverage. Uh, now we've got a
- drone for every use case. This has been a big part of our vision
- from the founding
- of Skydio. We want to be able to serve all the data
- capture needs that you guys
- have, and I think now we've got it done with
- these two products.
- Or do we?
- So if we zoom out a little bit,
- many of our customers cover even larger areas.
- If you think about Las Vegas, they have densely populated urban areas,
- uh,
- but it's an 8,000 square mile county.
- How are we gonna do that?
- Well,
- we need something that's got a faster top speed, it's got longer endurance,
- longer range. Now, one answer to that might be
- to just build a giant quadcopter.
- [laughing]
- And you ... It is true. If you, like, if you keep dialing in mass into a
- quadcopter, you will increase flight time.
- But this is an incredibly inefficient way to do it, and we also know that
- kinetic energy is not our friend.
- So we don't want to do this. We're big believers that smaller, smarter
- drones are better than bigger, dumber ones.
- So if we want to stay small and smart and be efficient,
- we need a wing.
- The problem with wings is you got to take off and land,
- which means building a
- really long runway.
- So in the aviation world, some of you are probably familiar with this term,
- putting
- a wing, taking off from a runway is kind of known as conventional takeoff
- and
- landing, CTOL.
- If you don't have a runway available, you can do other things.
- So there's different ways of doing this, but you can basically either tilt the
- propulsion system on the drone or have an entirely separate propulsion
- system,
- uh, and this is called vertical takeoff
- and landing.
- So this is what the Harrier Jet does.
- There's a number of drones out there that do this kind of like VTOL thing.
- Um,
- so these are the two dominant possibilities, but there are some signs
- that something else can maybe be done.
- So this is a product called the ScanEagle.
- It's a drone that's a couple of days old ... or a couple of decades old.
- [drone buzzing]
- So the ScanEagle comes with this launch track and then this capture
- mechanism.
- [drone buzzing] So it's, it's pretty violent and doesn't seem,
- like, totally
- optimal. Uh, but it is a pretty interesting idea, right?
- The idea is that rather than needing to build a runway,
- you can just have this kind
- of like fixed, contained piece of infrastructure.
- The problem with all of this stuff is that it requires a lot of
- people. You need somebody there to manage
- and operate the launch and land station.
- With a VTOL drone, you still need somebody on the ground to
- launch and land the
- thing. Um, what we really want is something like this for a
- fixed wing. That's right. This is the phone moment. Get your phones out.
- [laughing]
- How do we do this for a fixed wing vehicle, this kind of beautiful simplicity
- of dock, launch, and land? Well, we have an idea.
- And I, I want to emphasize up front, this is a prototype.
- It's not yet a product.
- We're giving you guys an early sneak peek.
- The team has been busting their butts getting ready to show you this.
- [drone buzzing]
- [cheering]
- [applauding]
- How about that?
- So it's a perfectly sleek, elegant airframe.
- It's got two motors, two control surfaces.
- By the way, what we're looking at here is a fully autonomous mission.
- All of this is downstream from just one click to get that thing up in the air.
- So it's now flying its mission.
- Looks like it encountered some fog.
- [laughing]
- We'll see what we can do about the fog.
- I'm gonna confer with my team here for a minute. Maybe mic off.
- [laughing]
- All right.
- So the fog might have consu- confused the drone a little bit,
- but we are still
- going to attempt to return this thing.
- So the big question, we used the robotic arm to launch it.
- How are we gonna land it?
- [laughing]
- Any guesses?
- [laughs] At one point earlier today, I had a slide of a
- rocket getting caught by the chopsticks.
- We could try something like that.
- [drone buzzing]
- It's probably another good moment for the phones.
- [drone buzzing]
- [cheering]
- [applauding] Whoo!
- How about that?
- [cheering]
- [applauding] As, as a questionably wise man once said,
- "Fuck
- it, we'll do it live."
- All right.
- So we've had conventional takeoff and landing,
- we've had vertical takeoff and
- landing. I think what we're doing here is actually a
- fundamentally new category that we are calling
- robotic takeoff and landing. And the idea is if you're taking off from
- a
- fixed location, you can use the robot to get the drone in
- the air.
- You take all of the mass and complexity, leave it on the ground so that the thing
- that flies can be as light and simple and elegant as possible.
- So we were certainly inspired by other things out there
- that kind of point in this
- direction. Um, you know, I think the ScanEagle's a really
- interesting example.
- You can also look at air cr- cr- aircraft carriers that do stuff like this.
- But it turns out the idea of using a robotic arm to catch an airplane is, is,
- uh, is not a new one. We looked around and the MIT Nonlinear
- Systems Laboratory has this awesome example from almost 30 years ago.
- It's a paper airplane, uh, but it's the same basic concept,
- and this is something
- that we've really been building towards at Skydio for years.
- We think of our docks as these robotic launch and land systems, and actually, our
- last generation dock for Skydio 2 and X2 has a robotic
- arm that extends to launch and catch the drone.
- I've personally been working on fixed wing stuff my whole life.
- I grew up flying radio-controlled airplanes.
- My master's research was an airplane that could fly itself around in a parking
- garage, and we've really just been looking for an
- excuse at Skydio to build a fixed
- wing drone for, like, the last 10 years.
- So this was some early experimentation we did in 2018.
- Um, so
- prototype, not yet a product, uh, but everything we're doing is with
- reliability in mind. Now, I realize that the robotic arm seems like kind of a
- crazy
- contraption, but I think it's actually a beautiful,
- simple, elegant solution, uh,
- and we've cycled this thing quite a bit.
- Um, so you might remember the wind wall from
- last year.
- We've done a ton of wind wall testing on this thing.
- Uh, as we blow it around here, the robotic arm and the whole perception
- estimation
- system is smart enough to, uh, to adapt to whatever you can
- throw at it.
- Um,
- and we're continuing to accumulate cycles, so it's still very nascent, but we've
- already done over 1,000... now I guess 1,001 missions,
- successful landings. Um...
- [audience cheering]
- And we're moving super quickly. So we expect to be doing real customer
- missions,
- providing real value in early access in the first half of next year, and
- we'll go from there.
- Why did we build this thing? Well, at maturity, we think a product like this
- has the potential to end high-speed car chases.
- Just send a drone, keep everybody safer. No need to send a car on the ground.
- F10 has the potential to bring full-fledged DFR to even
- the most sparsely populated rural areas in America.
- It can cover our entire energy grid, cover thousands of miles of
- transmission lines from just a few locations with extended range.
- It could cover the entire road network.
- You can do proactive inspections, respond to emergencies, whatever's needed.
- Uh, and you should never have to send a
- person, a soldier, to the front lines to
- launch and land a drone. You should send a robot ship with a robot
- arm
- with some flying robots rather than putting a h- a person
- in harm's way. Uh, it pairs perfectly with X10 to
- cover larger areas. Uh, and at scale,
- eventually, our goal is to have one of these things in reach of
- every square mile
- of land mass on Earth.
- So we've talked about the evolution of drones.
- Drones have been toys, then they became tools.
- Now the drones are becoming critical physical
- infrastructure themselves.
- I realize a lot of folks view the United States as the
- underdog in the drone world,
- and I don't necessarily disagree.
- But I also know that this new era of drones as
- infrastructure is an entirely new ballgame.
- It's different technology, and this is really why we started Skydio.
- Make drones smart enough to fly themselves, put them in more places,
- make them more
- useful to more people, and now we've got a whole flam- family
- of autonomous flying robots to do useful work, keep people safer.
- I can't wait to see what you do with them. Thank you, everybody.
- [audience cheering]
- [upbeat music]
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1 Hr 36 Min 21 Sec