Skydio Ascend '23 Keynote
It’s here! The new Skydio X10—next evolution of aerial intelligence.
If you missed the live keynote, get ready. You’re going to witness an incredible demonstration of truly transformative technology, including:
- A live incident response using patrol-led DFR (Drone as First Responder)
- An introduction to Skydio NightSense, where you’ll watch Skydio X10 fly autonomously at night
- A walk-through of first-of-its-kind capabilities that change the way critical industries complete their work using drones
And you'll hear from leaders with NYPD, Pacific Gas & Electric Company and the Kansas Department of Transportation.
Learn more about Skydio X10.
- [upbeat music]
- We rely so much on electricity, even a, an hour worth of
- outage time is just going to be unbearable for the end customer.
- We have miles of transmission lines. We have thousands of substations.
- The entire country runs on the energy grid.
- Day-to-day agenda is patrol, respond to dangerous situations.
- If someone's injured and they need help and we can't find them,
- seconds matter.
- So we've got to get people on scene, on site, and locate where those people
- are so
- we can help them and assist them.
- If you're safe and you have reliable power, then you know, your customers
- generally are going to be super happy with the service that you're providing them.
- The most important people on the battlefield are the young men
- and women that are
- spread out doing the mission, uh, that are on mobile patrols.
- They'll need information that is timely, relevant, and
- accurate. There's two problems. One is you have too much information.
- That is a huge burden on your time and energy, and the other
- is not having enough
- information at, at the time and place they need it.
- So this is Interstate 80, and this connects California to
- Nevada to Utah. It's a major trucking route.
- If it gets shut down, it causes a lot of issues, so.
- When you bring in a super truck and have to close a lane,
- it's not always ideal
- because you're backing up traffic.
- Last year, we had the big floods where we
- were losing bridges, where we were losing
- infrastructure. When you're losing bridges,
- you're losing millions.
- People don't understand how important these jobs are.
- [audience cheering]
- You all, those of you in the room here today live,
- those of you joining us
- remotely, you're the ones who keep the lights on,
- who protect our communities, and help to protect our national security.
- It is such an honor and a privilege to be here with you today
- and to get to work
- with you on a day-to-day basis.
- Our mission at Skydio is really all about you.
- We're trying to take some of the most advanced technology in the world
- and deploy
- it in service of the core industries that our civilization runs
- on. Our goal is to make the world more
- productive, creative, and safe
- with autonomous flight.
- And when we started ten years ago, it's kind of crazy that it's been
- that long,
- the mission was just in our heads. It was theoretical.
- It seemed like drones had a lot of potential.
- It seemed like autonomy was going to be important.
- Thanks to you all, this mission is now coming to life.
- Earlier this summer,
- Sumner County Sheriff's Office in Tennessee saved a man's life with an X2.
- He was in distress in a cornfield. You couldn't see him at eye level,
- and the drone
- flying overhead helped the officers locate him and rescue him.
- We're incredibly proud to have deployed thousands of drones as part of the US
- Army Short Range Reconnaissance program that help protect our prot-troops and
- protect our national interests around the world.
- Japan has more bridges per capita than any other country in the world.
- They also have a lot of earthquakes.
- Thanks to JIW, a significant percentage of those bridges
- are inspected with Skydio
- drones. It helps them get efficiency for their
- aging workforce,
- and it helps keep the people that depend on those bridges safe.
- And there's hundreds more examples like this.
- At this point, Skydio serves over fifteen hundred
- enterprise and
- public sector organizations, and we've delivered over forty thousand
- drones.
- So given all of this, I think it's interesting to take a step
- back and think big
- picture. So this is kind of the classic technology
- adoption curve.
- Every technology goes through this journey. Things start at zero.
- Then you get some early adopters, some visionaries,
- and eventually things end
- up at full maturity, full deployment.
- Cars have been through this,
- PCs, social media, for better or worse.
- Maybe we're off the end of this thing on social media.
- So I think it's interesting to ask the question, where are enterprise drones on
- this curve?
- So maybe before we get into that, quick show of hands,
- raise your hand in the
- audience if you helped start your organization's drone program.
- That's great. A lot of hands go up.
- [audience clapping] We'll talk more about this, but, but we have some real
- visionaries and pioneers here with us. It's part of what makes this fun.
- So you probably get different answers to this question from, from different people.
- Some people might say, "Hey, drones are out there.
- They're doing all kinds of stuff. We might be close to full maturity." At
- Skydio, we have a very different perspective.
- I believe we're still very early in this journey, and the question that I think is
- most relevant is, of all the times and places when a drone could be useful,
- when real-time information could make a difference, when having that critical
- inspection angle could make a difference, of all those different instances, what
- percentage of the time is there actually a drone there capturing
- that data?
- Now, the answer to that question isn't zero,
- but I think it's pretty small.
- And the story actually goes way beyond just drones.
- So this is kind of a view of the US economy.
- Here we're looking at digitization versus productivity
- growth. So-- And we-- we're seeing all the different industries
- in play.
- So some, some industries are natively digital: financial services,
- media, IT, and the Internet. And these industries
- enjoy v- pretty, pretty strong productivity growth.
- But really the core industries that our civilization depends on
- are natively
- physical. They're much harder to digitize,
- and the lack of information has really severe
- consequences. So people literally lose their lives on
- the battlefield because
- they're unaware of nearby threats. Soldiers have to guess about what's out
- there.
- Most infrastructure maintenance programs today are predicated
- on kind of a time-based schedule, where you have a schedule,
- you do maintenance
- based on a schedule rather than the actual condition of the asset.
- This leads to a lot of guesswork, and, and sometimes it leads to, to consequences
- with, with really severe failures.
- Imperfect situational awareness leads to officer-involved shootings,
- lower community safety.
- And the tragedy of all this stuff is that the data that matters is
- there. It's kind of hidden in plain sight.
- It really seems like drones should be the ultimate tool to go out there and collect
- this data. So the question is: how do we go from where we are now
- to where we want to be?
- So my general philosophy on business, maybe on life, is that
- everything starts with the people and the team.
- So we saw a lot of hands go up earlier.
- Part of what I think makes this industry so exciting is that it is still early
- days. The people who are in it are in it with a belief in what's
- possible. They're in it with a vision for the
- future.
- They're willing to overcome challenges and work together.
- This goes for our team at Skydio, and it goes for our collaboration with our
- customers as well. So the team is really important,
- but the tech and the products matter a lot, too.
- And we have a product announcement today that we couldn't be more excited about.
- So to help set the stage for that, I'm gonna
- kind of a brief view of the drone landscape.
- So the traditional axis of innovation in the drone space has been all about
- hardware.
- So these are the sensors the drone carries, the form factor, the flight time,
- and
- this stuff really does matter. This is an area where companies based in
- China have done some very impressive things.
- They're leveraging the Chinese consumer electronics ecosystem.
- They're operating at significant scale, build very integrated, capable systems.
- At the same time, a number of Western companies have tried
- to replicate some of
- this functionality by essentially piecing together off-the-shelf components.
- And there's been some valiant efforts,
- but it's hard, not necessarily impossible, it's hard to build a really great
- product doing this.
- With our current generation of products, Skydio is kind of somewhere in between.
- We've got more scale, more hardware capability than most of our
- Western peers, but
- we haven't yet been able to go toe-to-toe with everything coming out of the, the
- drones in China.
- The hardware axis isn't the only axis in play, though.
- So no matter how far out you move on hardware, you kind of always work for the
- drone. It could have great sensors, it could have great capabilities,
- but you're
- always going to be there flying it.
- The other dimension that we think is really important is AI and autonomy.
- So AI has kind of exploded in public consciousness over the last
- couple of years. I'm guessing many of you
- are familiar with, maybe you've played
- with ChatGPT, seen these incredible results from,
- from generative AI.
- So this is a technology that Skydio bet big on ten years ago
- when we started the
- company. We essentially went all in on computer
- vision-based AI.
- So this is a video from one of our first products.
- This is a drone autonomously following and filming a mountain biker.
- It's using machine learning to map and recognize the world around it, knows
- where the mountain biker is. It's predicting into the future,
- replanning hundreds
- of times a second. This is the kind of thing
- that would be beyond the, the piloting
- capabilities of even the best drone pilots in the world.
- That same technology foundation has enabled us to automate many
- of the most important and complex tasks for professional users.
- So this is an example for 3D scan, where the drone automatically explores the
- structure, builds a real-time 3D model, uses that model to guarantee
- high-resolution photo coverage of the whole thing.
- And we invested in this technology
- because we believe this is the thing that takes us to the future.
- This is the thing that changes the paradigm from having one
- drone watching over a
- hundred soldiers
- to having a hundred drones keep that one soldier safe.
- This is the kind of technology that should enable us to blanket our
- critical
- infrastructure in proactive real-time inspections.
- You know the complete state of everything all the time.
- You can make proactive decisions.
- This is the kind of thing that should enable us to put drones
- everywhere they could
- be useful in public safety:
- mapping crime and accident scenes, responding to nine one one calls,
- going into
- dangerous situations ahead of people to keep officers and the community,
- communities they serve safer.
- So we come back to our chart here.
- Got the two axes. So there's actually not
- that big of a difference
- between the drones coming out of China and,
- uh, our, our Western peers when you look at the, the AI
- and autonomy dimension.
- But this is an area where Skydio has built really significant lead.
- Unfortunately, though, that's left folks with a choice,
- and it would be great if you could kind of get the best of both
- worlds, if you
- could get great hardware and world-leading AI and autonomy in the
- same platform.
- So that's kind of key question number one.
- If we zoom in on hardware,
- we oversimplify things here, but we kind of think about different,
- different size
- classes of drones. So there's a class of big drones.
- These are the things that take up most of the trunk of a car.
- They probably require two or three people to operate.
- They're pretty cumbersome.
- They're super capable. There's a lot of versatility there.
- On the other end of the spectrum, we have what we think of as kind of
- medium-class
- drones. These are-- you know, they don't fit in your pocket,
- but they're small
- enough and light enough to take with you wherever you need them.
- They're super convenient, uh, but they typically have
- compromised hardware capability and versatility.
- It would be awesome if we could kind of pull down some of
- that big drone capability
- and versatility into more of a medium-sized package.
- Question number two.
- The final question is: where are these things made?
- So
- as drones have become more important for our critical industries, I think it's
- become more clear how fragile it is to be depending on drones made by our
- adversaries. There's a lot of different opinions on
- this, but that should not be
- controversial.
- And I don't think it is. You know, a recent poll,
- ninety percent of folks in public
- safety said that they would prefer to be using drones made by a US company.
- Unfortunately, today, we think it's probably less than ten
- percent.
- As a leading US company, this is something we take personally.
- It would be great if there was a US option that had everything you
- needed across the board.
- So we've got three key questions.
- Is it possible to get great AI and great hardware in the
- same package?
- Can we take some of that big drone capability
- and pull it back to a
- medium sized package?
- And finally, is a US company going to step up to the
- plate and deliver something
- awesome?
- What do you guys think?
- [cheering] [clapping]
- Yeah.
- Huh?
- [cheering]
- [clapping]
- All right.
- [cheering]
- [clapping]
- Today we're launching the Skydio X10. This is our answer.
- Let's see what it can do.
- [cheering]
- [upbeat music] Behind every flickering light,
- every open road,
- every safe community,
- you'll find people.
- People who keep our civilization running and who depend on having the right
- information at the right time.
- It's here for them.
- Skydio X10, it's here. With the best sensors ever in
- a drone this size.
- The first of its class with the FLIR Boson+ six forty by
- five twelve radiometric thermal imaging with maximum sensitivity.
- A one-inch fifty megapixel sensor with a custom wide angle lens.
- Or the sixty-four megapixel narrow angle camera to capture the data
- you need, even during low light inspections.
- Transition zoom can read a license plate from eight hundred feet and identify
- cars from three miles away.
- You've never seen like this before.
- It's here and it's ready for anything.
- X10's durable, lightweight airframe goes from backpack to
- flying in under
- forty seconds and thrives in the most challenging environments.
- It's tough, quiet, and resistant to electromagnetic
- interference.
- And the open modular platform is built to adapt with sensor packages and
- attachments to get the job done.
- Capable of flight command from seven point five miles away using the ultra-bright
- controller with a multiband option for operations in a contested
- environment.
- An optional 5G gives X10 unlimited operating range anywhere there's a
- cell signal, unlocking remote command and control from any connected browser.
- [drone flying]
- Marine unit one to Zero Bar.
- Copy, marine unit one. We have assumed control of Skydio X10.
- So personnel on the ground can be fully focused on the mission at hand.
- Marine unit one, we have individuals stranded on the roof
- of a residence.
- We will guide you in.
- It's here. A new era of onboard AI and computer vision
- lights the way with Nightset,
- enabling autonomous flight in zero light conditions.
- Obstacle avoidance can now do the work for you, even in the darkest
- environments.
- Turn complex jobs into completed jobs with the automated capture of critical
- data, while onboard modeling takes you from
- images to insights in
- minutes for immediate action.
- The best sensors ever in a drone this size, piloted by the most advanced
- AI in the sky
- to get you the details you need, whenever you need them, wherever
- they are.
- Designed, assembled, and supported in the US
- and trusted around the
- world.
- Capture every last detail, night or day, rain or
- shine, when it matters most.
- [drone flying]
- Skydio X10, it's here.
- [clapping]
- [cheering]
- All right, so there, there is way more awesomeness in this thing than
- we could
- possibly get into a three-minute video.
- There's probably more than we can get in a keynote, honestly, but we're going to
- try. Um, so what we'd like to do now
- is kind of take you step by step through the product and
- show you what it can do, what it means for you,
- and also give you some
- insight into how we built it. This is really a cutting edge aerospace device
- packed into an extremely small package.
- And we're going to start at,
- we're going to start at the business end of the drone.
- We're going to look at the sensor packages.
- So these are the cameras that capture the data you need.
- This is an area where we've made massive investments over the last three years.
- We've probably heard from one or two of you that a twelve megapixel
- camera might
- not always be enough to get the job done.
- We heard the feedback,
- and we're taking a huge step forward here.
- So to introduce that, I'd like you to hear from the team
- that did the work
- and in all the innovations going into X10.
- People who are most likely to use drones in the utility industry are going to be
- your linemen, your operators, your engineers.
- The introductory use case is really to replicate the operator rounds
- and
- get the operator to be on the ground where they normally would have to be up in the
- air or rappelling or in a bucket truck.
- The ability to see millimeter size or sub-millimeter
- cracks in insulators, be able to see the really small things
- that you would
- only otherwise be able to see by putting the human eye as close as you can,
- well within minimum approach requiring an outage.
- The ability to do that is super valuable.
- In order for drones to be a good solution in law enforcement, it needs to
- have really great imaging. There's no point in having something
- that's not
- providing you with the best possible results, and so we need
- sensors that are giving us clear images of what is happening on the
- scene. [upbeat music]
- We talk to our customer and say like, "What's the hardest thing your camera
- system
- has to do?" We don't go for like the low-hanging fruit.
- We choose the hardest target, and we aim at that
- when we're developing our cameras
- and testing our cameras. So like the hardware
- is designed to meet those
- requirements. The testing has made sure
- that we're hitting those targets or
- exceeding those targets, and we don't really stop until we get
- there.
- Our next generation is the first one that we
- customize all of our cameras, and that's why in our next
- generation drone, we have three different user cameras.
- One with high resolution, one with large field of view, and one
- with a longer focal distance that we can see three hundred meters away.
- The idea behind building a camera module is you have a sensor and you have a lens,
- and if they're not in parity, then there's a limitation there.
- Like you have to have a s- lens that's capable of resolving the full
- power of the
- sensor. So we had to design it and push our vendors to up the quality of
- their
- lenses and add, you know, features and, and aspects to the lens so that we could
- really have a camera system that's in harmony between lens and sensor.
- It is very exciting because I've been through several
- iterations of camera build, and I can see how much
- the camera improved from all aspects, from different
- build to the next build.
- Skydio puts a ton of effort into our tuning.
- We spend many, many hours, you know, fine-tuning and tweaking, making
- very subtle adjustments to things like noise performance and sharpening.
- There's a very fine line of getting it just right, and we spend a huge amount of
- effort testing in the real world, testing in the lab to make sure that
- that comes
- out, you know, just how we'd like to see it.
- Specific use cases I tune for are related to thermal.
- Make sure like in inspection and situational awareness use cases
- that, you know, they can be confident that the data they're getting is
- accurate. On the software side, like the Atlas SDK with FLIR really
- make the images detailed, clear, and
- also radiometrically accurate. We can actually see per
- pixel what the temperature is. Really excited to see what people say
- when they
- actually get their hands on it.
- Without the right sensor, it's really tough at two
- or three hundred feet to see
- what's down there, and you really want to have a camera
- that like essentially puts
- you on the ground. It's going to be something
- that everybody's been waiting for.
- [audience clapping]
- So the, the sensor packages on X10 are replaceable, they're
- removable. We'll have two options out of the gate,
- the
- VT300Z, which is a little bit more optimized for
- long standoff,
- and then the VT300L, which is a little bit more optimized for
- close-in inspection
- work.
- We're not done with just these.
- You can expect, uh, to hear about V100L coming soon.
- We know not everybody needs a thermal camera, so we have an option, uh,
- without the
- thermal camera for, for folks that just want visual inspection data.
- So what I'd like to do now is tell you a little bit of the story on
- each of these sensors. So when we started designing these things,
- we essentially
- worked backwards from our customers' most important needs.
- You heard some of this from our team there.
- So the starting point
- is pretty simple. How much detail can you see from how far
- away?
- I love the way Fritz described it in the video.
- You want a sensor that basically puts you on the ground,
- even if you're two, three
- hundred feet up in the air. So that was the motivation for developing the
- telephoto
- camera. So here we are about three hundred feet away.
- You might be able to make out a car somewhere in the distance there.
- We're now going to punch in to telephoto. We're a little bit closer now.
- Now we're going to go all the way in.
- Incredible detail from three hundred and fifty feet.
- [audience cheering] This was captured in the air.
- [clears throat] So to, to put this in perspective,
- we're going to see how this stacks up against some other options that are out
- there. Uh, so we've got X10, and then we're going to
- introduce-- We've, uh, we've changed the names here to protect
- the not so innocent.
- [audience laughing] Uh, we've got the Havok and the Emo,
- two other medium-class drones that you might consider.
- Uh, so let's see what we've got.
- Uh, there's really not much of a comparison,
- is there?
- So this is same conditions, [audience cheering] same time of day,
- captured in flight six hundred and fifty feet away.
- So in order to make this a fair fight, we're going to have to go up a weight
- class.
- Uh,
- so we're going to go up to our friend the Patrice.
- [audience laughing] Patrice Thirty.
- So please note this weighs about two X as much as the X10.
- So now you're in the territory of you might want a couple people to operate this
- thing, much less convenient to get it in the air.
- And, uh, and now we're roughly comparable.
- Um, there's a great camera on the Patrice
- Thirty, much bigger drone.
- Uh, but, uh, we've taken all that capability and, and packed it
- into something way, way smaller.
- I think we can pretty confidently say this is the best zoom ever on a drone this
- size.
- All right, so what about thermal?
- So we've integrated the FLIR Boson+.
- This is the first drone ever with the Boson+ in it.
- FLIR has been the leader in thermal imaging for the last two decades.
- Uh, and I know the point of these images
- is for inspection, but I think it's also
- cool to just look at it and appreciate how beautiful that is.
- Like it's wild that that's possible.
- So this is an image captured of a distribution pole.
- You can see incredible detail on the pole itself, which is about thirty feet away.
- You can see great detail on the trees, which are a hundred and fifty feet away.
- The Boson+ is radiometrically accurate, which basically means that you
- can get an exact temperature reading for every pixel in that image, which is
- super useful for inspection. So here we're flying over a solar, solar
- farm. We're looking at solar panels.
- Uh, and we actually, while we were capturing this content,
- detected a potential
- issue. So you see that little red H that's firing.
- That's a hotspot on one of those solar panels, which is an indicator that it, it
- might be unhealthy and need to be replaced.
- We've built the full suite of radiometric tools, so you can measure specific point
- temperatures. You can measure the average temperature
- over a region of interest.
- Uh, it's really, really incredible stuff.
- The thermal camera is also key for seeing at night for
- situational awareness use
- cases. So here we're looking at a person in a car
- from seven hundred and fifty
- feet in flight. You can see the hot front of the car from
- the engine running.
- You can see the person walking around. Great detail.
- To put this in perspective again, we're going to compare against some other
- options. So The Havok and the Emo are back.
- Same flight conditions. Uh, and the X10 is just way clearer,
- way sharper, way more detail from a long standoff
- distance.
- We're gonna go up in weight class again.
- We'll bring back the Patrice. And here, actually, the X10 is noticeably
- sharper again. From a long distance, you can just see incredible detail.
- This is the best thermal camera ever on a drone this size.
- [audience applauds]
- All right.
- What about detailed inspections?
- All right, so when we talk to our customers in the
- civil engineering space thinking
- about bridge inspections, we hear about, "And we want to see the finest crack
- possible."
- Uh, that was the motivation for developing the
- narrow camera here.
- So we're looking at full frame image.
- This is taken about one meter away, so 3.3 feet.
- Does everybody see a crack in the image?
- Think you see the crack maybe. All right, we're gonna punch in
- and see the crack with great detail. Everybody see the crack now?
- Great. All right.
- That's not the crack we care about. We're gonna go in again.
- That's the crack we care about.
- S- so that is
- .1 millimeter crack in concrete, image from, from one meter away.
- We'll compare against other options out there.
- So now we're gonna have to go up another weight class. This is the Patrice 300 now.
- So this is a drone that weighs about three times as much as
- the X10.
- Uh, I think you'd have to be crazy to fly this
- thing three feet away from a bridge
- that you were inspecting, so we didn't even try it.
- We just carried it up there, uh, 'cause we wanted to compare the camera,
- uh, and
- it's pretty comparable. So at a, at a s- fair comparison with a longer standoff
- distance, uh, you'd be in a different realm.
- Uh, but this is an incredibly detailed
- inspection camera.
- Overall, I think we can pretty confidently say
- these are the best sensors
- ever on a drone this size. We heard the feedback, we took it,
- we worked hard for
- the last two and a half years, and built incredible sensor packages for
- you to get
- the data you care about.
- [audience applauds]
- So now that we've got great sensors, we need to put them where you need them,
- and
- to do that, you need a great airframe.
- So we tried to build an airframe that was super versatile, super robust.
- The way we think about it, it needs to be ready for anything,
- anywhere,
- anytime. So to tell you more about that, I'm excited for you to hear from our
- hardware team on the great work they've done here.
- What's been proven so valuable to military forces is that a small drone that's
- small enough to be backpack portable and light enough to, you know, to, to,
- to be
- carried by a, a soldier can go anywhere with that unit,
- and it's an organic
- sensor that they own, that they can, uh, deploy, uh, quickly, uh, at, at
- the time and place they need it to get the information.
- Having the b- the ability to, uh, make better decisions on the battlefield
- is key.
- Our overall brief was just to make our drone products better
- in every way possible
- from our, our past generations. Having to carry around a giant aircraft
- would be prohibitive in a lot of use cases, and so size ends up being really,
- really important. It also ends up being very difficult,
- like, making something
- that's super capable and very dense from a feature perspective
- is
- also really hard to make small at the same time.
- We've been able to incorporate all of these features into an overall product
- that's
- only four and a half pounds, which is just awesome.
- Every square millimeter, every cubic millimeter really ends up
- mattering.
- You end up fighting for those in order to make the product really elegant and
- small.
- So the challenge in designing drones is you wanna make them as lightweight as
- possible. Any extra size is not, not only like extra
- material that you're, that customers are gonna have to carry around,
- that you're
- gonna have to build into the case, but also the, the mass.
- So you want everything small, you want it dense.
- And that goes down to, like, on the component level.
- You, like, take our main logic board, everything is incredibly dense on here.
- We've been doing this daily, is you take a cross-section of the drone,
- look inside,
- where is there wasted space? How could we move around components,
- interfaces,
- circuit boards such that we can take advantage of
- that wasted space?
- We have a lot of high power electronics inside.
- Like, that's what enables the autonomy system.
- That's what enables the radio to work really well,
- the cameras to work really well.
- And as a side effect of that, there's a bunch of heat that's generated.
- So in this case, we have about 40 watts of heat
- that has to be cooled, which is a
- substantial amount. And so part of the design of the core
- structure is how do we
- remove that heat from the system as efficiently as possible.
- We intentionally decided to go with a three-bladed propeller again this time,
- similar to X2. The three blades will slow down the rotor
- rate quite a
- bit and reduce the overall noise footprint,
- and we know that's important to a lot
- of our customers.
- In terms of durability, we've chosen a few design features to
- enable
- this to be a rugged, like, enterprise product.
- For material selection on previous products, we chose magnesium and unfilled
- polycarbonates. On this program, we chose glass filled and carbon filled
- to increase the stiffness of the system, um, without taking on
- extra weight.
- Our arm structure is an ultrasonic welded assembly, and so we're able to
- basically fasten two pieces of arm material together
- in a continuous way around the length of the arm without using screws
- or snaps or other things. So it makes the arms really strong
- and really light, uh,
- and really robust in general, and that's a new,
- new process for us on this product.
- These things are gonna be used and abused. You know, they're thrown in backpacks.
- They're, you know, dropped off tables.
- We wanna make sure that we're future-proofing all of these
- designs and validating
- them to how they will be used, not necessarily to just how they're being
- used
- today. We use large scale thermal chambers
- that we can
- fly in hot and cold temperatures. We use these vibration tables to
- validate a lot of our really vibration sensitive electronics.
- We have also developed in-house what we call our wind wall to simulate
- the highest degree of winds that we expect.
- We have water cycling rigs to kind of catch all of those edge cases of how these
- might be used by customers.
- So Skydio is a bit different in our development process from some competitors
- where
- we do a lot of the development in-house.
- So the design, the engineering, we do all of our reliability testing
- in-house. We're able to iterate more quickly
- and ensure
- reliable and efficient products that way.
- When you look at the team, the product design team,
- we're just excited to come to
- work every day. I think it's special to work in a place
- like that, and that shows
- off in our products. There's detail because there's ownership
- in the parts we're
- designing
- So with X10, I think the customer should really be able
- to just achieve all that
- they need to do in their day-to-day work easier, essentially.
- It should be more efficient. It should be easier for them to move the
- product
- around, to use their product. They should be able to do whatever they
- need to do in
- their use cases with X10.
- [audience applauding]
- So what, what does being ready for anything mean?
- Well, it means you can be up in the air in less
- than 40 seconds.
- I know 'cause I've timed it. Hopefully this number will go down over
- time as we get
- into to optimizing the software more.
- It means you get up to max 40 minutes flight time,
- means 45 mile an hour top speed.
- Whoo.
- And it means IP55 rating, so you can fly in [audience applauding]
- light to medium
- rain.
- The other dimension to this is the modularity of the airframe.
- So from the beginning we wanted to build a modular and open system.
- So there's four payload bays, top, bottom, both sides,
- and right out of the gate we're developing a suite of first party
- attachments to adapt to your mission.
- So we've got a spotlight, speaker mic to facilitate
- two-way communications. We've got Night Sense.
- We're gonna hear more about that later.
- We've got RTK GPS for high precision capture,
- and then we've also got a parachute for ultimate peace of mind if you want the,
- the
- final fallback.
- So we've got a very versatile airframe. We've got great sensors.
- The next thing we need to do is get connectivity to the drone so we can
- get control
- and we can also get the data to where it matters.
- This is another area where we've made major investments over the last three
- years to bring together a suite of connectivity options.
- So you'll hear now from our wireless team on the great work that they've done.
- Connectivity is, is probably the second thing everyone asks
- for, the camera and
- the connectivity. "I need range." Um, certainly in urban environments, the
- high RF means that even though you may not want to go 12 miles, you need a
- signal that's strong enough to do that because you're gonna be flying in RF
- rich environments. You'll fly behind trees, behind buildings,
- and that's not only
- important for flying by hand with tactical operations, um, but that's also
- important for advanced operations like drone as first responder.
- Rather than just focusing on the, the single radio link between
- the, the controller and the drone, we, we took a,
- um, a approach where we want to sort of enable
- a, a, a suite of
- connectivity options. And, and between those three connectivity means
- we have a rich fabric that allows crisp video
- and responsive controls and
- seamless connectivity no matter how complicated of a mission you throw at the
- X10.
- We kind of started over from the ground up with new hardware that was optimized in
- terms of its sensitivity and antenna performance to provide
- maximal coverage in all directions.
- We added, uh, capabilities that, that improve performance in a
- congested environment by sig- significantly improving the
- link that transmits from the controller to the drone.
- We have an asymmetric link. The command and control that is
- used from the controller to the drone i- is very, very narrow.
- We don't send a lot of data to control the drone.
- The downlink is actually standard.
- It's a meaningful and significant benefit, and it sustains the
- link further out and make it much more robust.
- The multi-band radio on the X10 offers a wide range of flexibility,
- allowing users to select specific frequencies tailored to their operating
- environment. This was an important design consideration for
- optimizing radio
- performance in support of global government and international customers.
- With this next generation, uh, uh, drone, the one feature that I'm most
- excited about is the maximum range that we're gonna get.
- So in our case, we basically use, uh, do a lot of, uh, innovations in the
- materials that we use and the type of PCB materials
- that we choose, the type of
- wires we actually put into our system for better shielding, better, uh, noise
- immunity and, uh, better noise rejection from the
- environment around it.
- The X10 has a 5G cellular modem directly
- integrated in that allow you to sort of hand off seamlessly between a
- controller and, and a, a remote operator and, and a web browser.
- Being able to pilot, uh, from anywhere to anywhere is
- really the next generation of, like, where drones need to go.
- You need to be able to put them on a, a wide area network,
- like a cellular network,
- and give access to the video stream.
- And so we, you know, really thought about a lot of the use
- cases for streaming,
- for direct connection, for remote operation and, you know, we're
- like 5G cellular has to be in our next generation product.
- You can now have this one tool that has so many incredible
- innovations inside of it, and a wireless system that allows you to
- extract all of that information in real time wherever you are,
- whether you're right next to it flying it manually, or if you're sitting somewhere
- in your office and you're flying it remotely.
- [audience applauding] All right, what, what are we gonna do with 5G?
- So how many people here are familiar with the concept of drone as
- first responder?
- Whoo.
- Most. All right.
- So how many people know the origin story of drone as first responder?
- Fewer. Some, but fewer. All right.
- So
- once you've seen this, you really can't unsee it.
- The concept of drone as first responder is sending a drone out in response to a
- 911 call. It gives you real time aerial
- intelligence, gives everybody
- better information to make better decisions.
- We see this as the future of drones in public safety.
- It's been a big part of our vision in the space for years now.
- And philosophically, one of the things
- that we try to do as a company is when
- there's something that really matters, it's really important, we go out
- and we try
- to find the best people in the world at that thing.
- So
- I'm super excited now to introduce Fritz Reber, who
- leads public safety integration at Skydio, who's one of the creators of
- DFR, to show you what it's all about
- [audience applauds]
- Thank you very much.
- Um, very excited to be here today. As Adam mentioned, uh,
- prior to Skydio, I was with the Chula Vista Police Department
- for 27 years.
- And it was during my time as UAS commander that Cape
- Termis and I began working on a unique
- use case for drones in everyday policing.
- We worked with a great team at Chula Vista PD to go from concept to
- reality, showing public safety everywhere how to
- routinely use drones to deescalate, increase
- situational awareness, and reduce response times.
- In fact, today is exactly five years to the day
- that we officially named this concept Drone as First Responder, or
- DFR. And now DFR is known worldwide as the
- ultimate
- public safety drone case, drone use case.
- So I'm e- very excited to demonstrate how the Skydio
- team
- can bring that life-saving capability to your
- community through patrol-led DFR.
- Let's, uh,
- begin the live demo now.
- [ringtone] Hi, Frank. I have a call pending in your area near
- 223
- Halik. Caller states the female appears
- disoriented, uh, talking to
- herself, and carrying a knife. Subject is a white female, thin build, blue shirt,
- gray pants, black boots. No threats or reports of injuries at this time.
- Be advised I don't have any other available units right now.
- 5 Frank, I copy. Uh, I, I saw the call come over on the CAD
- system. I'm staged about a block south with the
- Skydio
- X10. Do we have any DFR pilots available?
- Uh, DFR 1, I'm monitoring. I'm available to assist.
- 5 Frank to DFR 1, you're clear to launch, and show me switching to Axon Body
- 4 for recording and comms.
- Uh, DFR 1 copies. I have you loud and clear on Axon Respond, and
- I'm launching now.
- 5 Frank copy.
- And DFR 1 got a good feed.
- And just a heads-up, uh, you may have a jogger heading to you right
- now.
- 5 Frank, I see her.
- DFR 1, be advised we might have a possible
- underneath the bridge north of
- us.
- Copy that. I'll head that way. I'll, uh, I'll start th- search now.
- I'll go down low and look underneath there with the thermal.
- Copy. I'm gonna clear this parking lot and continue north.
- Copy that.
- And got the thermal on.
- So far no heat sources. Appears clear under the bridge.
- Still looking.
- 10-4.
- And DFR 1, I actually might have a possible here.
- It's under the northeast corner of that, uh, building in the crawl space.
- Appears to match the female.
- Uh, definitely, uh, talking to herself.
- She actually has a large fixed bladed knife in her right hand.
- 10-4.
- Just hang by, hang there. I think she's keyed in
- on my drone. Affirm. She sees my drone.
- She's coming out
- and still has a knife. Actually, she's putting the knife down now.
- She's got the knife down now. She's got her hands up, surrendering,
- surrendering to
- the drone.
- Uh, she might-- You might be able to reach out-
- 5-
- ... to, call to her now.
- 5 Frank, I see her. I'm gonna call her out to me now. Miss!
- Miss, police department.
- Come on over this way. You all right?
- You have any other weapons on you?
- And DFR 1-
- Okay. Keep your hands up. Come towards me
- ...
- DFR 1, uh, as soon as you can clear code four,
- I'm gonna have to clear for a, uh,
- nearby missing child.
- All right. DFR 1, you're clear to disengage.
- Uh, she's requesting to go to the hospital.
- We're gonna be code four here.
- Thank you for the backup.
- Copy that, DFR 1. Good job. I'm out.
- [cheers] [applauds]
- [clears throat]
- [applauds]
- J- j- just in case that wasn't totally clear, that
- was all live.
- An X10 just flew remotely over 5G, controlled from
- right here in the Cow Theater.
- [cheers] [applauds]
- Now, the beautiful thing about what you just
- saw is you can do it today.
- It fits into existing drone operating paradigms.
- The X10 can be carried in the trunk of a police car, and if an officer on scene
- needs extra support, they can put it on the ground,
- and they can get virtual
- real-time support from a real-time crime center.
- Somebody flying overhead, looking around corners,
- helping them get the information
- that they need. And the X10's autonomy enables
- that to be done at low
- altitudes to get the vantage point you need. It's really,
- really incredible stuff.
- Now, the other key point here is that DFR is
- not just kind of a one company or one product sort of thing.
- It takes a lot of different technologies coming together to del- deliver a
- solution, and we couldn't be more excited
- or happier at Skydio
- to have a really close partnership with Axon, the leader in public safety
- technology deployment. To tell you more about our work with Axon,
- I'm
- incredibly excited to welcome their chief product officer, Jeff Kunins,
- to share more about what we're doing together.
- [applauds]
- [clears throat]
- [applauds]
- Thanks so much, Adam. Wow, it is such an incredible honor, uh,
- to be able to be here today and to be able to play even a small part
- in
- this incredible launch of the all-new Skydio X10.
- It's pretty amazing, right?
- [cheers]
- Yeah.
- So as Adam said, my name's Jeff Kunins.
- Uh, I'm the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Axon.
- That means I have the, uh, privilege of looking after all of our
- global
- R&D for our hardware and software products, including Taser,
- body cameras,
- digital evidence management, and of course, drones.
- And, um,
- we,
- with today's launch of the Skydio X10, I just wanna talk
- briefly about three things that I'm confident are true
- and, uh, that have a huge role to play in the
- future of where we're all heading.
- And it also means that, um,
- everything that you may hopefully enjoy and like about any of Axon's
- products, all the credit goes to our incredible
- teams.
- And anything that you might not like as much or might have feedback on, I'm
- sorry, it's all my fault, and we would love to hear from you.
- So
- I am here at Axon
- because I am so passionate...
- Nope.
- Slides?
- Can we get the right next slide up?
- Keep going.
- Just keep going? All right. So I am here at Axon
- because I'm so passionate about our moonshot goal
- to reduce gun-related deaths between police and the public
- by 50% over the next 10 years.
- And,
- uh, as I said, with today's launch of the X10, we
- are incredibly excited, and I want to talk about three things
- that I'm confident
- are true and that have a huge role to play in our collective efforts to
- achieve that moonshot goal.
- Number one, as you've been hearing all morning,
- but fundamentally, we believe that
- drones will not only be a useful tool, but they
- will become one of your most powerful all-day, everyday tools
- to get everyone home safe.
- Number two, as you also saw a bit of, about communications.
- Rich, modern, interactive
- communications, and those tools are not just for your teenager.
- They will
- help save lives, they will help save time, and they will be
- fundamental to us unlocking so much more power in
- the future of public safety. And number three, with the leadership,
- frankly, first and foremost, of every one of you who are in service
- here in this room, combined with the power of the
- Axon, uh, operating system for public safety, and
- now with Skydio's unmatched drone hardware,
- autonomy platform, and software made right here in the USA,
- that we collectively are unstoppable in the pursuit of that
- moonshot goal.
- So first, let's talk a little bit more about DFR
- and drones as first responder.
- As you heard from Fritz and others, now thanks to the groundbreaking
- work by agencies like Chula Vista, we are now starting to
- really have the data to back up the promise
- of both the life-saving benefits and, frankly, the dispatch
- efficiency benefits of DFR.
- Chula Vista is now seeing up to 20% of their
- calls for service completely handled solely with a drone,
- in part because they're able to quickly ascertain
- which incidents are able to self-resolve far before an
- officer can even arrive on scene, and then quickly redirect those
- resources to where they're going to be most useful.
- And as a result, we at Axon are seeing a
- 10X increase this year in the number of agencies that are
- already seeking to start their DFR programs right now.
- And as we start, as we keep collaborating with Skydio
- and their unmatched autonomy platform and all the other capabilities you're
- hearing
- about today, as well as our other key drone
- technology partners like D-Drone and DroneSense, we are all
- confident that we are moving towards expanded FAA
- approval of the beyond visual line of sight
- approvals that we all know will unlock true
- exponential expansion of DFR for all of us.
- Next, let's talk about communications.
- As you saw in that demo,
- empowering an officer on the scene with direct,
- hands-free, eyes-free, one-to-one
- communication with a remote drone pilot
- unlocks a completely more natural way of
- interacting and collaborating in real time when
- responding to a scene.
- And they're able to do that without tying up the radio
- and without even
- entertaining the hassle of things like setting up custom talk groups or things
- like that. And far beyond drones, other groundbreaking
- agencies like the Texas Medical Center have already started live
- streaming 100% of every call for
- service right into dispatch. Why?
- Because it actually improves officer safety and, believe it or not,
- it actually increases dispatcher efficiency.
- In fact, Texas Medical Center, since they started doing this,
- has actually
- decreased dispatch staffing by
- 25% while successfully handling an
- increased call for service load of 38% on a monthly
- basis. Huge, perhaps counterintuitive improvements
- that they're
- incredibly proud of.
- And as another example, agencies like Tallahassee
- PD are already starting to use hands-free,
- eyes-free, one-to-one voice communications right from
- their
- Axon body camera to help provide faster and
- easier access to bringing in a mental health
- consult or a language interpreter live on scene,
- even when they can't physically be there in person.
- And so putting all that together, last but not least, as I started with-
- Together,
- we are in pole position to accelerate the adoption
- and the impact of all of these ideas in the real world,
- in the real communities that all of you serve every single day.
- At Axon, we're so proud, uh, to provide the world's
- leading operating system for public safety technology.
- And as you're seeing today with Skydio, you now have access to the
- world's leading drone hardware, software, autonomy
- platform, and more, made right here in the USA.
- And together with all of your leadership to help unlock that
- and bring it to reality and to support all of you in the field,
- we are unstoppable, and we will
- achieve our moonshot goal. Thank you.
- [audience applauding]
- All right.
- We get slides?
- Oops.
- So last but definitely not least in our tour through the
- X10 and everything it can do, we're gonna talk about the work
- that we've done on
- the autonomy systems. So we're not content to have the best
- autonomy system
- out there. We've doubled down on that.
- We've made huge investments to get to the next level.
- Let's hear from the team that did it.
- [gentle music] I think the biggest obstacle that the
- utility industry faces in terms of implementing drones is that drones
- are just
- really hard to fly.
- When I was a company commander, uh, in the middle point,
- point of the Iraq War, our
- companies were deploying for seven months, and they would be back in the U.S.
- for five months. And in a five-month period of time,
- you had to train up your
- Marines on some very, very complicated tasks.
- So the easier it is to fly, the easier it is to maintain,
- those all add
- up.
- Our second generation drones were the first drones that really
- were autonomous
- enough to operate in unknown, complex environments.
- Now, with our third generation of drone, we are fundamentally
- upgrading both the camera package with custom design
- navigation cameras and also a compute
- package by having the NVIDIA Orin and state-of-the-art Qualcomm Snapdragon
- chips that have 10X the deep learning capability.
- With increased compute power, we're able to process these cameras at
- higher
- resolution, and then we're ab- also able to see in lower light
- and higher dynamic
- range scenarios. And so we're going to be able to really
- fundamentally
- upgrade what our, our drones can do.
- As we were able to
- build a whole camera from scratch as a custom design, every single part of it
- was optimized for its maximum functionality, which is very hard to get
- with off-the-shelf components. We're able to go to, like,
- more than 2X the sensor
- resolution that we had compared to a previous generation.
- So wh- what that means is, like, our sensor resolution
- is so much better than what
- we had before that we should be able to detect and avoid, like, much smaller
- obstacles with much higher accuracy.
- So that resulted in what we-- what I consider is a, is a
- best-in-class navigation camera.
- One of the things that we're doing is we're supporting, uh, IR or thermal
- subject detection for the very first time, building a lot of these features that
- enable operators to have a better sense of, uh, their
- surroundings and, and that's what situational awareness
- is all about.
- Right now, we're enabling the ability to autonomously
- track, uh, vehicles and people from very far away,
- um, in daytime and at night, primarily talking about doing that on
- the long-wave infrared or the thermal camera.
- Uh, the data collection piece is hard.
- One of the big things is that the thermal feed
- is actually registering a
- temperature signature, and so we don't have colors, for example,
- of the
- clothes that people are wearing, which are typically used by the tracking, uh,
- component. And so we could even use, for example, a
- detection-only approach and per frame detections rather than using
- a detection
- plus tracking approach, which is computationally more efficient for
- higher
- resolution cameras.
- We demonstrated against a variety of different backgrounds that we're able
- to, um, track subjects very effectively.
- Having a really powerful camera sensor package combined
- with much more powerful computing allows us to be able to
- build for years on top of this platform to add more and more AI
- functionality and make the drone more powerful because we have the
- foundations of the hardware.
- Ultimately, the improved autonomy makes the barrier of
- entry even
- easier because it takes the burden off of the user to have to be
- perfect. At the end of the day, you're not looking to make pilots.
- You're looking to give your existing frontline personnel the tools that they
- need and the skills that they need to do their jobs more
- efficiently and more
- safely.
- [audience applauding]
- All right. Hello.
- So as you just saw, autonomy's not a feature for us.
- It's kind of the whole architecture.
- So from day one of this company, we've worked to optimize everything,
- the hardware, the software, the algorithms, the UIs to
- enable true end-to-end autonomous flight.
- And that's what you need to do to make it really work because when it works,
- if you're a skilled pilot, it reduces your mental load
- and makes it so that you
- can fly more productively. If you're a brand-new pilot, it
- makes it so that you can get up in the air and flying with confidence in just
- hours. And long term, it means a lot of useful work can get done
- with no pilot needed at all.
- So the X10 is our new foundation for AI and autonomy
- for years to come. And why is that? Well, because it's
- a flying supercomputer. So this thing has on board a--
- the latest flagship NVIDIA Orin processor and a
- top-of-the-line Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.
- Together, they have eighty-five teraops of computing
- power, so that's
- eighty-five trillion operations per second that can be
- used to run our deep networks and everything else.
- That's 10X the previous generation drones, which are already the top of the line.
- So why do we need that much horsepower?
- Well, earlier Adam mentioned ChatGPT, and I think [laughs] a lot of
- us have gotten a sense of just sort of the amazing general understanding
- and reasoning capability of modern AI.
- And so the X10 is built to enable this kind of general purpose
- visual understanding onboard our drones by being able to actually
- run foundational models.
- So that's gonna make the drone smarter, it's gonna make it faster, it's gonna make
- it get better in the years to come.
- The most important input to the autonomy system is
- the 360 navigation cameras. So that's why, as you just
- heard, we've invested in best-in-class custom
- sensors for this
- drone, and the combination of that computing power combined
- with the cameras just upgrades the level of robot intelligence.
- So for example, the X10 is shipping with a brand-new deep
- network for obstacle avoidance. This network is bigger and also
- processes 10 times the number of pixels from our previous generation of drones,
- and it's based on a modern transformer architecture that's optimized
- to run on the tensor cores of the NVIDIA GPU.
- So altogether, this makes it so that we'll see thinner stuff, we'll
- react faster, all around better. But I think most of you here already know
- that
- Skydio is the leader in obstacle avoidance and
- navigation. So what I really want to focus on is,
- and what we've been building
- towards, is AI applications on top of the core
- navigation
- engine that enable really new use cases and paradigms for drones.
- So 3D Scan is a perfect example of one of those applications.
- So if you're going out to do an inspection today with a manual
- drone, uh, you're probably doing some kind of 2D
- lawnmower or simple
- pattern, and sometimes it's just not a fit for a 3D
- world.
- You've got obstructions, you've got terrain.
- And so 3D Scan is powered by our VPS, the Visual Positioning System,
- that is not for obstacle avoidance, but it lets the drone build a map that it
- actually remembers between flights and between multiple different
- drones to provide centimeter-level precision so that the drone can
- understand the structure and create a tailor-made flight path that
- captures just the right data. So once you have the data,
- usually you're gonna go and try to make some kind of 3D
- reconstruction, and you
- can use one of our photogrammetry partners like Bentley, Pix4D,
- DroneDeploy, and that usually means you go back to the
- office or you bring a big
- computer, you upload the data, and you wait.
- Um, so with the X10, we're shipping onboard modeling,
- which means
- that once the X10 flies, when it lands, it's thinking,
- and after a while, you get out a textured 3D mesh
- or a stitched 2D
- ortho photo that you can use on the spot.
- And what our customers have said is that this is incredibly useful
- if you're in the
- field and you need to make on-the-spot decisions.
- Or
- if you want to make sure that you have the right data at a remote
- site so that you
- have the confidence that you don't have to go back there.
- So 3D Scan and onboard modeling work really well together, and they're amazing
- tools. But let's take a preview into what we see
- as the next
- step. So 3D Scan is built to capture kind of
- comprehensively every inch of a surface, which is
- often great, but sometimes you're not there for that.
- Sometimes an operator has a very specific shot list they're there to get.
- They want to get what matters, the insulator, the junction,
- the skid marks,
- whatever, and they want to get in and out quickly.
- Um, they don't have time for thousands of
- photos.
- And so what we're trying to do is exactly that for 3D Scan,
- extend it so that it understands what we're looking at, what matters,
- and be able
- to capture an automated shot list and
- do it in record time. So we're starting to see early R&D results
- for this,
- something that we think can scale and be really powerful,
- so we're excited to kind
- of work with you all to develop this within the Skydio ecosystem into something
- that really has an impact. And let's just take one more step
- further now looking into the, the future.
- So the combination of the X10's compute with its sensors, with
- foundational AI, starts to turn the drone into something
- really different.
- So we like to think of the drone going from a tool to being a teammate,
- as a kind of an embodied AI that, um, can communicate with you with
- natural language and can learn and, and kind of be trained so
- to work with humans, to work with other robots.
- And that's kind of the vision that we have.
- That's what we think this hardware foundation lays out for.
- Um, but all right, I'm getting a little ahead of, uh, myself,
- so let's just
- rewind and talk about what we're announcing today.
- So,
- so far, Skydio's leading vision-based autonomy
- works
- primarily in the daytime because there's light for the cameras.
- So that's about to change. So I'm really excited to introduce today
- something that nobody else in the world offers, so let's take a look into
- Nightsense.
- [gentle music] So this is the first time that any drone will
- have vision-based navigation obstacle avoidance at night and in the
- dark, and it does this by having powerful add-on
- lighting attachments
- that go in the top and bottom payload bays
- that provide bright 360
- illumination for the drone that then allows the cameras to see
- and use our
- autonomy system. So this can be done in either visible
- light or
- infrared light. So we've designed a version of these
- cameras with lenses that can
- see both visible and IR light in the right ways of
- capturing the most value out of these lighting attachments while not degrading
- the daytime performance and, and sharpness.
- The previous generation nav cams only operated in the visible
- spectrum. But for this one, we optimized it for performance also in
- the
- near-infrared. So we had to carefully work with a, uh,
- make a custom
- filter working with a filter design vendor to make sure the band
- is wide enough to let the active illumination that we're gonna provide at
- night go
- through with high transmission but not so wide that it
- compromises performance during daytime because there's a lot of infrared coming
- from the sun. It's very challenging, but we had to...
- That's one of the reasons why we had to make it custom.
- What was available off the shelf doesn't kinda check all the boxes.
- This is the super zoom view, uh, of our Skydio system,
- which is a concatenation of the six navigation
- cameras. We have a six by five window, and we want to be able to
- see if the vehicle can navigate at night without hitting the obstacles.
- And there's a lot of challenges involved because if you think about the, the robot
- itself is lighting up the scene around it, and so
- the
- You know, shadows and motion of the drone itself will cause
- motion in
- the scene. Any sort of dust will cause reflections
- and, and
- backscatter
- When you're flying at night, a lot of the dust in the air,
- fog in the air, anything
- that's small particles that reflect light, um, show up extra
- bright in the image and throw off a lot of the vision-based
- algorithms.
- And then we can train the, the DeepFlow network
- that does your stereo,
- um, correspondences and your, and your obstacle avoidance.
- That network can, can be more robust to, to basically not
- identifying those short little streaks, um, as obstacles
- We are able to transition between visual navigation when you're
- flying close to things, and then to GPS-based
- navigation when you fly further away and there's nothing to illuminate
- anymore. And so this enables a lot of the safe
- and trustworthy
- navigation that's known, you know, Skydio is known for, um, at
- night. The drone actually sending out this,
- this light
- surrounding the environment and using our same core autonomy engine
- is, is really
- magical and something that we've worked hard with our kind of
- hardware design and
- camera design to, to enable and, and ship with this product today
- Mike? Yeah, Mike. It's awesome, awesome stuff.
- This is the kind of thing that's only possible with really tight integration
- between the hardware, the software, the lenses, the algorithms, designing the
- custom networks, everything coming together to unlock this
- capability.
- We developed Nightsense because we know that many of our customers' most
- important missions happen at night.
- So this could be used for nighttime search and rescue.
- You could use it to get under the tree canopy to see things you wouldn't be able
- to
- see any other way. Could be used for low-light inspection.
- Uh, so it's one thing to, to see Nightsense in a video,
- hear all about it. We thought it'd be fun to, uh,
- to give you a live
- demonstration of this capability, so you all are gonna be the first in the
- world to
- get to see this. This is a Nightsense demo,
- so we're gonna need the lights off.
- Go lights off.
- All right, do we have streams up on the TVs?
- It looks like we do.
- All right, let's, uh, let's do it.
- [drone whirring]
- So X10 is now flying
- based on its onboard infrared illumination using Nightsense.
- We're gonna give you a view so you can imagine you're the operator.
- You can fly around. We're looking at the thermal camera here.
- Feel free to wave at it.
- It's a radiometric camera, so we know if you've got COVID.
- [laughing] Hope- hopefully nobody does.
- All right, so here it's using visual navigation for
- state estimation, so the only
- way it knows where it is is because it's looking at those cameras.
- Now we're gonna take it up a notch. Let's lower it down to obstacle height.
- Cave, who's flying this thing, even though he leads solutions engineering
- for us,
- he's not a very good pilot. He's just gonna jam the stick forward,
- and we'll, uh,
- we'll see what X10 can do. So now we're actually looking at the
- navigation cameras
- of X10. So this is how the drone sees the world.
- So you're seeing the navigation cameras stitched together.
- This is a new feature on X10, gives you much wider field of view,
- and, uh, no problem. X10 seamlessly navigates through all the
- obstacles.
- [audience cheering] So the, the final level
- here-- So you've, you've seen it avoid some wooden
- structures.
- The final test is can it avoid a CEO?
- So let's replace, let's replace the wood with
- me. Um,
- one of the other cool features we've unlocked on X2, or X10,
- excuse me, uh, this is actually a feature that's so cool our
- marketing team hasn't
- been able to figure out a name for it yet.
- But basically what this enables you to do is it en- enables you to see the 3D
- structures the way the drone does.
- So if we can go ahead and turn that on, you're gonna get to see the way the drone
- sees the world. So if I walk up to it here,
- [audience applauding] you can see it recognizes me.
- All right, let's see if it'll avoid me.
- [audience cheering]
- All right. That, ladies and gentlemen, is Nightsense.
- [audience cheering]
- All right. [audience cheering] Good to see you all
- again.
- [audience applauding] So one of the areas where we know this matters
- most is in the defense world. Many of the most important military
- missions
- happen at night,
- uh, and that's a good setup for our next
- speaker here.
- So you heard this theme and you'll hear it again.
- When we want to do something, we try to go out and find the best people
- in the
- world at that thing to help our customers navigate all the challenges in front of
- them. So our next speaker is our president of our global government
- business. He spent his career in the Air Force
- flying F-16s.
- After he left the Air Force, he joined Microsoft,
- where he led their national
- security team, helped bring Microsoft's products to the
- defense world, helped
- deploy cutting-edge AR and VR technology to the Army.
- After that, he built the team and the business, the,
- the government team and the
- government business at Scale AI, and now he's at Skydio.
- I couldn't be more proud or excited to welcome Mark Valentine.
- [audience cheering]
- Thanks, Adam. Appreciate it.
- Hello, everyone. Uh, I'm Mark Valentine.
- Thank you, Adam, for an outstanding introduction.
- I'm quite sure I don't deserve that.
- Uh, but it is a pleasure to be with you all
- today.
- Uh, and I'm also, uh, really excited and really honored to be on the
- team here at Skydio at this really important moment, not
- only for our nation, but free nations around the world
- and their
- militaries. [clears throat] 'Cause we are once again struggling with how do we
- prepare for great power competition?
- And I recognize this might sound really weird coming from someone who actually
- sat in the cockpit of an F-16 for over twenty years and flew combat
- missions, but I think an important part of
- that preparation for great
- power competition is with small drones.
- Small drones are having a meaningful impact on the battlefield,
- and that's not just my opinion. We are seeing this happen around the world,
- where
- militaries are loading up with these small drones because they are having an
- impact. Specifically small drones because they
- give cost, great
- cost, great flexibility, and they're having a meaningful impact on
- missions across military operations, whether it's
- ISR or intelligence, surveillance or reconnaissance, search and
- rescue, explosive ordnance disposal, and even site security.
- Of course, I think the biggest example
- that we have today [clears throat] is coming
- from the war in Ukraine. And if we could go ahead and play that video.
- Uh, we're seeing the Ukrainians make a
- meaningful impact on the
- battlefield with small drones.
- They're using them to find enemy formations, to understand the enemy
- scheme of maneuver, to improve their targeting,
- and as you're seeing in this
- video, actually document war crimes for
- prosecution
- after this war hopefully ends very quickly.
- [clears throat] Well, I'm sorry
- here. [laughs] As we've seen, though, in conflicts throughout human history,
- when
- one side gains an advantage using some sort of technology, the other
- side will always seek to deny that technological advantage.
- What we're seeing right now in the Ukraine-Russia conflict
- are the Russians are
- turning to robust electromagnetic warfare, or EW.
- And essentially what they're trying to do is jam satellite navigation
- signals [clears throat] so the drones can't get where they need to go, and
- also jam command and control links so that operators can't make them
- do what they want them to do. And if you listen to some reports,
- we are seeing that this jamming is so robust that the Ukrainians are
- losing up to ten thousand drones per month.
- Ten thousand per month. So that's [laughs] an effective, uh,
- counter that the Russians have put together.
- [clears throat] So while I've used a cartoon to
- display this and illustrate it for you and somewhat simplify it,
- make no, uh, bones about this. This feature, counter fe- feature
- competition that is going on is deadly serious, and
- it is only accelerating. So the pace of this technol- technology
- change is going off the charts, and if we as a set of
- free nations want to maintain our global competitiveness, technology
- companies and governments around the world absolutely must partner
- together to deliver the best kit we can as quickly as possible at
- the speed of need to our war fighters.
- At Skydio, we believe that means using commercial off-the-shelf
- or COTS products delivered by dual use companies who can not
- only innovate rapidly but use the economies of scale we get
- from our commercial operation to deliver big tech in big
- quantities at rapid speeds. And by that, I mean time cycles
- measured in maybe one or two years instead of
- the multi-decadal cycle that we've become used to with military
- acquisitions
- based off this, my favorite JCIDS chart.
- So thankfully, it sounds like people are starting to get the message, and we've
- heard, uh, Dr. Kathleen Hicks, the Deputy Secretary of the U- US Defense
- Department, [clears throat] recently announce the
- Replicator initiative.
- Now, what this basically says
- is that small autonomous systems are important on the modern
- battlefield. I agree. I also think this is a tacit
- acknowledgment that small drones are an important
- part of military mass. And for those who aren't military
- scholars, mass is an important concept in military
- operations,
- and military theorists have been writing about this for literally two
- thousand, almost twenty-three hundred years
- when Sun Tzu first started talking
- about it. At a high level, what it really means
- is the ability to concentrate
- power at a specific place at the right time to
- achieve the desired results. And if we've learned nothing from what is
- going on in the Ukraine conflict right now, when we as free nations
- are building our forces in this great competition,
- especially against people that we expect to use robust
- electromagnetic
- warfare against us, we absolutely have to be building smart
- drones
- at scale and doing it now.
- At Skydio, we believe that AI is the antidote to that
- EW. It allows us to operate where others
- can't, and it
- allows us to not only create mass or even affordable mass,
- but an effective, affordable mass.
- So at Skydio, we are proud of what we've done with the
- X2.
- It's become a leading platform and in many ways this trusted platform of
- the US
- federal government and many allied nations, twelve so far.
- But we're even more excited, uh, to talk about and expand those
- capabilities and expand that trust that we've created with
- the X10D.
- So, uh, we've established through this discussion
- so far that war
- fighters need effective, affordable mass, and that means smart
- drones. The X10D is our answer. The
- X10D, the D being a defense variant of the X10,
- uh,
- is designed with advanced sensors, uh, and advanced radios,
- and it literally makes this thing an ISR machine that is smart,
- small, and survivable. And you see here that we're gonna, uh...
- it's gonna be NDAA compliant. We're also seeking Blue UAS.
- So as we walk through the X10D, you'll notice first that it is all gray,
- and that's to reduce visual signature.
- It's got the advanced sensors that you've already heard about
- that will allow our
- war fighters to go further, go faster, see further, and
- do more on the battlefield. It is ruggedized. You saw the IP rating.
- Also, it has the open modular architecture so
- that we can seamlessly integrate with
- existing battlefield awareness tools, communications protocols,
- controllers, RAZ-A, uh, ATAK,
- Tomahawk, et cetera. So we think that integration is extremely important.
- The attachment bays are there, so not only are war fighters prepared for
- today's
- fight, but also tomorrow's fight for sensors
- that we don't even know
- we need right now.
- Also, we have the multiband radio, which will allow us to deploy this drone
- in
- diverse wireless environments around the world, and also counter jamming.
- And this game-changing, world-leading autonomy engine
- that you heard Hike
- talk about allows our war fighters to operate seamlessly
- day and night, and automate many of their flying tasks so
- they can
- concentrate on the fight and not the flight.
- We've also added a ton of more innovations to the system, and I'll quickly go
- through them. You already know that we have the world-leading FLIR Boson+
- camera on board for the thermal imaging.
- We've also added the ability to track subjects in IR.
- So any of you who have tried to follow a thing or a person, uh, with
- manual joysticks on a drone know how hard this is, and hopefully you understand
- how important it is. So with our autonomy engine, we can now
- identify a person or a vehicle and make sure that that stays centered in
- the frame as it moves. So with the X10D, you can now do this confidently
- day or night based on the thermals.
- We've also put a very, very precise coordinate generation
- capability
- into the X10D, [clears throat] and with this feature,
- the drone can determine its
- location, and based on visual cues, give very, very accurate
- coordinates to the center of the crosshair so that those coordinates can be
- communicated to other team members for recovery or action.
- And we fundamentally believe that these accurate coordinates, uh, will
- increase precision on the battlefield.
- And with increased precision, you've got better survivability and
- reducing the risk of unintended consequences.
- Much like the X2D, the defense variant of the X2, the
- defense variant of our X10 is also gonna have the Skydio Scout
- capability, which automates convoy security.
- Literally, you take your drone, put it in the air, and drive off, and the
- X10D is gonna tag along with you. This is not unlike having a long
- extensible pole with a camera on top that you can lift up to just about any
- altitude and point in any direction so that you can see threats coming your way.
- Before I leave the stage, though, I, I do wanna mention the thing
- that I am most
- excited about, uh, with my time here at Skydio is
- our vision for the future. And in that vision, we are
- fundamentally in a position to change the way human
- beings interact with robots.
- So you heard Hike talk about the flying supercomputer that is the X10.
- Well, all of that powerful compute unlocks
- amazing innovation
- potential that we already have dedicated engineering teams at
- Skydio looking to exploit in a multi-drone
- future. So if you think about drone ops today,
- [clears throat]
- most of you probably think about a single human taking out a controller and,
- with their fingers, communicating their intent to a single
- drone.
- That's great, and that works. But when we look at the trend lines of the
- future,
- we see a future battlefield with orders of magnitude
- more drones in them. And in that world, that one-to-one
- interaction between human and machine will never scale.
- We absolutely have to get to a one-to-many situation where that single
- human can translate their intent and distribute it
- amongst tens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of intelligent
- flying machines, who can then independently reason on how
- they
- can work together to achieve that intent.
- The applications for this in the defense space are off the charts, and they're off
- the charts in the enterprise space as well.
- And if you were to see any of our early testing, I'm telling you, it would
- be to get you extremely fired up for the possibilities, uh, which are soon
- to be realities for our war fighters.
- As I close, I, I just want you all to know
- that we take our role here at Skydio
- very seriously as the free world's largest at-scale drone
- manufacturer, and we also see it as our mission, uh, to
- build this industrial base capability so that we can continually to
- deliver these advancements, uh, to our war fighters in the future.
- So anyway, that's enough talk from me. I appreciate your time.
- Uh, it's time for me to get back to delivering
- game-changing drones to governments
- around the world. It's time for you all, uh, to get back to Ascend and to Adam.
- But I thank you for your time, and I look forward to seeing you this
- afternoon.
- Adam.
- [audience cheering]
- [audience applauding]
- Expect to hear an F-16 firing up any second now.
- [audience laughing] All right, so
- we've talked about X10. We've talked about all the incredible tech
- in here.
- We've shown you what it can do. We thought it'd be useful to just quickly
- hear from
- some folks, some customers that have actually gotten hands-on with
- this, gotten an
- early look. So here are their reactions.
- [upbeat music] Yeah, I mean, you can almost read
- that name tag from that
- early switch right there.
- That's what we like. That's great.
- Definitely significantly improved, I would say, how I could read the license
- plate on the other side of the parking lot over here.
- And it's still legible.
- Yeah.
- Wow, okay.
- The applications are endless for us.
- Central.
- We're trying to integrate it into everything.
- We can do this quicker, more effectively, remotely.
- Big time
- game changer for us.
- Yeah.
- Pretty much plug and play.
- The design I like. Much simpler. It's just simple fold
- spring arms. Leaps and bounds improvement.
- Yeah, the gimbal is slick.
- Yeah.
- Lighter, a lot lighter than it looks.
- I like this technology personally.
- The obstacle avoidance and the, the way that they,
- they don't want to run into
- anything makes a big difference.
- I tried to crash. It didn't happen.
- Yeah.
- The quality of the zoom, and now that that boost button, that's, that's
- pretty cool.
- Showing real time build out of a 3D
- model.
- Like pop out. Yeah.
- That ability is priceless really.
- That's really
- cool.
- Yeah.
- We drive eight hours to a project site, and if we don't collect everything
- we're, we're hosed.
- You can read the expiration on that.
- [laughs]
- Yeah.
- Yeah, that's pretty impressive. I know with that resolution you can do it
- from a
- quarter mile away pretty easily.
- It's the easiest thing
- that we could have.
- Right.
- It's priceless.
- Exactly what I've been asking for for two years now. Very impressive.
- All right, so we, we talked about being pioneers.
- We have a lot of visionaries in the audience here.
- So imagine we're out there on the prairie.
- Now we've got some X10s, which is great.
- It's probably gonna make hunting for food easier, keep us safer.
- Uh, but there's still other challenges out
- there.
- The drone by itself is not sufficient, and one of the things we're trying to
- organos- organize ourselves to do at Skydio
- is work through all the
- different barriers and challenges that come up.
- So one of the first ones, we hear this all the time from our
- customers, especially
- those that are standing up new drone programs, is we don't have enough pilots.
- You know, there aren't too many people out there who
- are expert drone pilots.
- Uh, so
- this is the major motivation for Skydio autonomy.
- The fundamental goal is to break through the barrier
- and put you in a position
- to give a drone to everybody in your organization who can benefit from one,
- not necessarily everybody who's a drone pilot.
- So the product is designed to be fundamentally easier to use,
- but we're also
- pairing that with training and services.
- So one of the things that we're announcing here today
- is a partnership with UAV
- Coach to offer Part 107 training, so you can buy it through us as part
- of, of buying our products, which lowers the barrier even more.
- So there's, there's no reason, easy as pie for anybody in the
- organization to
- get the training they need to, to fly one of these systems.
- So once you've got pilots, the next challenge
- is how do you scale beyond that?
- These images were all generated by AI, by the way.
- So we thought we'd, like, lean into it here.
- You can type in anything you want and get beautiful images of, uh,
- of what the
- computer imagines out there on the frontier.
- So the next challenge is, is breaking through that one
- drone to one operator barrier. Uh, and this is the
- major motivation for Dock. So some of you have probably seen this.
- At the end of last year, we announced our Dock Early Access
- Program.
- Since that time, we've delivered 350 Docks.
- Our customers have flown 20,000 missions,
- and we've accumulated over 1,700 flight hours.
- Pretty incredible progress in a pretty short period of time.
- Uh, now
- we're not going to announce an X10 Dock here today.
- We are definitely working on it, but the key thing I want everybody to
- understand
- is that X2 and Skydio 2 are still a great way to get started with
- Dock operations.
- One of the things that we've seen is, you know, this is really transformative,
- disruptive technology. It fundamentally changes operating
- paradigms, and there's
- a lot of things that go up, go into adopting this and, and making it
- successful within an organization.
- We've been through a lot of this with our customers on X2 and Skydio 2,
- and we're setting ourselves up to help people down that journey.
- So we offer deployment services. We offer training and operations,
- training for operations so everybody knows how to use the thing.
- Uh, we help you navigate the regulatory
- environment, and we'll partner with
- you as closely as you want to help you realize the ultimate business value that
- you're going after, getting the data that matters,
- getting it into the systems that
- you care about. Uh, so we thought the best way to understand
- this would actually be
- to hear from one of our customers. We're incredibly excited to be partnered
- with PG&E, and here's their story using Skydio Docks.
- [gentle music] It's a little new
- beyond visual line of sight operations with the Remote Dock.
- You just have to get used to
- not being there.
- It's gonna be a whole new ballgame.
- Starting with our drone program back in 2019, employees take drones
- out to the field. They fly the assets. They capture the imagery.
- All right, taking off. [drone buzzing]
- Most hazardous part of their job is probably getting to the structure,
- right?
- So it's a lot of access issues. It could be, "Hey,
- we can't find this structure,"
- or, "The road is out."
- With Skydio Dock, we can remotely deploy drones
- stationed at substations or other facilities for inspections,
- emergency
- response.
- You logging into Skydio Cloud. You connect to the vehicle online,
- and then you can put it in the air and capture data in matter of minutes.
- All right, launching.
- From a centralized control room, the pilot has the ability to pick
- and choose where
- he wants to fly and which assets he needs to fly without
- having to have that
- employee drive to that substation to fly that asset.
- Without a BVLOS waiver, you can't operate beyond visual line of
- sight, so you
- require a visual observer on site.
- Our recent authorization for the Skydio Dock from the
- FAA allows for full remote operations.
- With the Skydio Dock, a lot quicker response time.
- Say we do have a fault, we could send them out to look at
- that predetermined location and stream the video
- back to where a QEW lineman can look at that video and see
- it before they even have to leave their yard.
- [drone buzzing]
- Thanks to Skydio autonomy, we can navigate and operate safely in very
- challenging environments because we don't rely on
- GPS or any other sensors. Unique artificial intelligence
- algorithms, six navigation cameras, and a supercomputer on board
- provides different capabilities for the drone to operate fully
- autonomously.
- I've seen it avoid stuff out in the field, seen it get into
- tight spaces.
- There's a lot of trust being built with Skydio.
- For me, it goes seven years back when I first started.
- I've been hearing them talk about beyond visual line of sight just over and over
- and over again, but now it's finally here.
- And really, it's gonna completely change how we
- utilize unmanned
- systems.
- It's been a great opportunity for Skydio to learn how Dock
- solutions evolve those drone programs for an organization such as
- PG&E.
- I'm confident that we will have full remote operations in the future where
- drones will be living in a station, an alarm will trigger an event, and that
- drone would take off and get eyes on that risk immediately without any human
- intervention.
- The automation, it, it's gonna be the future.
- How much it's gonna open up the use case for drones,
- there's no ceiling.
- [gentle music]
- [applause]
- Th- thank you to PG&E. There's some really great stuff in there.
- Uh, and we're gonna take it a step further
- now.
- So this is the most fun part of the day.
- I'm, I'm really looking forward to being joined
- on stage now by three of our
- customers. Uh, and their organizations and their titles
- basically speak for themselves, so I'm gonna just roll through this
- quickly.
- We've got Jason Regan, the VP of inspections at PG&E.
- We've got Bob Brock, Director of Aviation at Kansas Department
- of
- Transportation, and we've got Chief Schell,
- oversees all of
- patrol at NYPD. Please join me in welcoming them on stage.
- [applause]
- All right.
- [applause]
- [laughs]
- All right. So we, we, we probably have some decent ideas based
- on the organizations
- you guys are from, but I thought it'd be great to just start
- by hearing, outside of
- drones, like, what are you guys working on?
- What are the challenges you're working through?
- Tell us a little bit more just about what your organizations are up to.
- Maybe we can start with you, Chief Schell.
- All right. Uh, good morning, everybody. Glad to be here.
- Thank you for, for the invite. Uh, I'm the Chief Patrol in NYPD.
- I supervise over 20,000 people that report directly to me.
- I'm basically responsible for the day-to-day out-and-out operations of our
- city.
- And for our team, for, for me, it's all about public safety.
- So, how do we improve our public safety?
- How do we get back to where we were pre-2020?
- How do we keep our community safe?
- And technology we use, but drones that we started using
- earlier have been a game changer for us. And any technology...
- This is about public safety, right?
- Uh, without public safety, our city can't thrive.
- So public safety is key. Technology is key.
- The X10, I saw some capabilities. I was sitting back there where I could read
- a
- plate from how many feet? 350 feet?
- 800 feet.
- Eight... I thought 800 feet, right?
- Yeah.
- Uh, thermal, you know what that's about.
- Halfway up the Empire State Building maybe.
- Yeah. [laughs] That's right. Infrastructure,
- obviously New York City has a huge,
- massive infrastructure. So all this together, technology,
- challenges, keep our city safe, and we're willing to take any, uh, any
- technology from Skydio or anybody that will help us do that.
- Awesome. So I think most of us are probably familiar...
- Well, we're familiar with all these
- organizations.
- Most of us are probably customers of PG&E, uh, so we have some
- familiarity there. But, but Jason, can you talk us through, like, what does
- inspections at PG&E mean? What is your day-to-day?
- What are the challenges you're thinking about?
- Yeah, ab- absolutely. First, first, I would be remiss if I didn't say thank
- you
- to all of you, I think you said pioneers out there in
- this space.
- Um, the video that you saw earlier was a collaboration.
- I, I know you said customer, but it's really a partnership and the, uh,
- true spirit
- of interdependence between teams. So thank you.
- And thanks to all of you out there that are helping
- change the way that we go about, um, ensuring
- public safety, inspecting of assets, and having situational awareness
- in areas that we desperately need that in.
- If you smell in the air a little bit right now, it's a little bit of smoke.
- And I know, Adam, you and I said, "Hey, look, it's not about wildfires." But, you
- know, Pacific Gas and Electric, along with our peer utilities in the
- south, have
- taken a stand that catastrophic wildfires shall stop.
- And there's no only if it involves PG&E equipment, only
- if it's in
- our service territory. We need to stop catastrophic wildfires
- from sto- from
- starting,
- and you are all part of that pioneer
- opportunity to do so. So we inspect about a half a
- million distribution ground, uh, distribution assets by ground,
- uh, and we inspect about 60,000 transmission
- line assets by
- both ground and air. That does not include our patrols or
- our substations. And so
- I work for all the, uh, fellow coworkers at Pacific Gas and
- Electric, born and raised in California, quite frankly, here in San Francisco.
- It's my state, it's our company, and we're looking to do everything we can,
- stay tenacious in our approaches, stay as owners, be
- curious with technology, and continue to implement and
- support new approaches that promote, to Chief's
- point, public safety,
- minimize the impact to our customers.
- And I know we had this conversation back at your headquarters
- that involved it's one thing to be able to go beyond visual line of sight and the
- advancements and the rewards with it, but it's another thing to work with
- a homeowner to say, "We don't need you to put your cattle
- away.
- We don't need you to stop
- growing the food that serves America in here purely because
- we need to come in and
- inspect."
- And you and your team have helped us provide that type of capability.
- And then the last piece I'll just push on quickly, and I know we got a lot of
- questions here, but
- it's the quickness and ease to get eyes on site
- with a threat.
- And that threat could be equipment that needs replacement, could
- be an active threat relative to our state or our communities, our
- infrastructure, and we just appreciate, uh, the opportunity to partner with you in
- this, uh, area of advancement.
- Great. Thank you, Jason.
- Uh, Bob, can you help us understand what's the
- purview of
- KDOT?
- You know, what do you oversee? What do you care about?
- Absolutely. So the Department of Transportation in
- Kansas has
- about 10,000 lane miles of, uh, road to maintain each year.
- We, uh,
- maintain and work with 140 public use airports.
- But we're-- I was specifically hired and brought into this team
- from my background, Mark Valentine was an interesting segue,
- I too was in the military working with drones and new
- technologies and things like that with the war fighters
- that you had on the screen.
- And one of the things that we find, in Kansas, we have a unique
- infrastructure that's very cool.
- It is an aircraft manufacturing culture So we call it the
- air capital of the world. Every, every state that has anything to do with
- anything that flew is the something, something, uh, uh, air
- something of the world. We build about 73% of the
- small airplanes in the world there.
- So 19,000 people every day are building airplanes.
- That's a lot of infrastructure to take innovation and scale it
- and build brand new things that are very useful.
- So there's a few things that we're working real hard towards, and,
- uh, as we
- work with other teams for Departments of Transportation at other
- companies... I know it may be surprising, but there is more than
- one company that builds drones that
- are nowhere near the culture and the
- attitude of working with our teams to say,
- "Help us build a capability."
- Whatever the device needs to be to deliver that capability, that's the kind of
- partnering we're looking for. So we're very grateful and for...
- It's tremendously exciting. I'm with you.
- The teams that we've known about and heard their names for several years,
- it's exciting to see them in person and say, "That's that person-
- Yeah
- ... that does that automation," and that, that's awesome.
- Yeah.
- So thank you.
- Thank you.
- Uh, so let, let's get into where we are now with drones,
- and maybe we can start
- with you, Chief Schell.
- Seems like New York City has leaned in in a big way to this technology.
- I think we've got a picture of Mayor Adams holding one of our controllers.
- You got my boss here? What? [laughs]
- I don't know if we got it live.
- [laughs]
- Uh, why now? Why now, and, and, and how are you thinking about
- drones? Where are you today?
- Look, public safety. I mean, it's, it's the name of the game.
- We'll take anyth- anyone that has something to offer to keep our
- city safe.
- We're a city of eight and a half million people.
- Okay.
- I... They s- they say the city doesn't sleep.
- I wish it would 'cause I can get some sleep.
- [laughs]
- I think I was... The amount of phone calls I got sitting in
- the back are amazing,
- but out hours. So the drones now, we, we, we, we started using,
- and they've been tr- they've been tremendous in so many areas
- for us.
- I, and I can give you examples of how we use
- them, use them now.
- Yeah.
- So... And real, these are real-life situations.
- Unfortunately, over the summer we had a couple of kids,
- more than one, go into the
- East River, and we lost them.
- With the drone capabilities we, we, we found them quick of,
- to give closure to the
- family. I mean, that, that's just huge, right?
- We've used them in mitigat- a lot of mitigation.
- So parks where we have violence, large groups of people.
- Strategically put them up,
- use the audio, clear the ca- clear the park, mitigate any
- violence,
- keep our cops safe, keep the community safe, and we, we,
- we were
- successful. Uh, just over two weeks ago, we have the Caribbean Day
- Parade in Brooklyn. It brings about a million
- and a half people to the parade.
- Uh, tends to have historic violence, and we had a bad situation where I
- was on the
- ground where, uh, we had a couple of people shot
- and stabbed.
- And with the 30 years of experience, I know a retaliation's coming right in
- front
- of me, and we were able to get the drone up right
- away.
- Situational awareness, like we were speaking about. What
- are we dealing with?
- How many thousand on that corner? What do I need on the field to,
- to mitigate that?
- Get the proper resource in. We cleared the corner.
- No issues. No one got hurt. Kept the community safe.
- We achieved our objective.
- So these are the things that the drones are gonna be doing for us,
- and it's gonna take us to the next level.
- And we have a mayor that supports crime fighting.
- He supports us, and he's number one into technology.
- If he hears something about technology, I'm on a plane within a week going
- somewhere.
- [laughs]
- Uh, but he's a big supporter of, uh, public safety and that's, that's,
- that's the
- key to success for New York City.
- Great.
- Bob, where, where are you guys today with drones?
- Well, we're having a, uh, tremendously fun time.
- I am thrilled to share the stage with the chief because we have 2.8
- million people in the entire state of Kansas.
- [laughs]
- [laughs]
- So 90-
- But you might be ahead of them in drone deployment
- ... Well, per capita, I guarantee it.
- But at the end of the day, quite honestly, we
- are... 90% of the cities in the state of Kansas
- are
- less than 4,000 people.
- 90%.
- That means there's a lot of ground to cover.
- Mm-hmm.
- We're blessed with natural disasters like
- tornado and flooding and windstorms and ice storms
- that are so remote.
- We just recently had a ranch, ranching
- family had an ice storm in the far western Kansas on the border of
- Colorado.
- Such a tremendous whiteout that there's no way to tell the
- status of their cattle herd.
- Big deal in that part of the country, and their lifeblood.
- When the weather cleared, every single one of those cattle had
- perished due to the ice,
- and there's no way to assess that and no way to find that out.
- We're using things and fielding new technologies
- for the purpose of saying, "What does full motion video,
- EOIR, all of that sensor capability deliver,
- and how do we do that in a way that is as fast and efficient
- and effective?"
- A DOT is so much more about effectiveness.
- We have a tough time with a spectrum of, are we super effective
- or are we using the taxpayer money to be innovative enough
- that we're not being inefficient?
- That is a critical, tough thing. I don't want a young 18-year-old with a
- 20-ton ice truck or r- or rock salt truck experimenting-
- Mm
- ... with how he's gonna be flipping that truck around in the middle of a
- highway on our 10,000 miles of... Uh, that's not the
- time.
- However, comma, if I find out, and Brendan or
- Jen or Adam comes and talks to me at a conference and
- says, "Why in the world don't you use this
- capacity?
- Because the thing you're using is so bulky and inefficient, it's
- awful."
- So we really fight that really hard.
- We're l- looking, looking and trying to innovate on the innovative
- side of the
- spectrum because it's our responsibility as steward to truly
- say,
- "How are you spending my money?"
- Yeah.
- That's a big deal.
- Jason, so we have, we have some insight from the video,
- but I'd love to hear-
- Yeah
- ... you know, where are you guys today with drones? What
- are you doing with them?
- Yeah. So, [sighs] um, look, you, you had a great slide up there about where
- we're
- at, technology, and time. Look, tech- technology's gonna
- continue to evolve. So that's always gonna be
- that leading corner.
- Um, you know, at, at, at my company, at our company, Pacific Gas &
- Electric, it's really about
- ensuring we serve the customer appropriately,
- and we haven't always done that.
- And I'm humble enough to say that we gotta do better,
- and we're well on our way to
- doing so already.
- Now, with that said, we provide a life-saving commodity.
- Chief talked about the public safety.
- You've talked about the challenges with, uh, Mother Nature and some of the d-
- disasters that, that, that, that are seen in your state.
- We cannot forget that every moment, whether it's gas or electric,
- that commodity is
- helping save lives. It's helping ensuring that food
- is on the table,
- that our garage doors open, that our internet's capabil-
- capable so that the
- thousands watching this can actually see it.
- The ability to stay nimble in the space to understand when that
- power is for some reason interrupted or unavailable, whether planned or
- unplanned, how quickly can we assess the situation,
- follow up with the human resource that is able to turn the
- wrenches and make the right decisions?
- And in the drone space, for the last five years, we've exper- been
- experimenting with a lot of different approaches, and we've been partnering with
- our partner IOUs, SCE and SDGE. My thanks to them 'cause we're learning
- from
- them also on different approaches.
- Either
- data capture, back in a controlled space, look at it, or on
- the ground at the tower, at the asset with the drone looking at it,
- right? This capability to be able to do it beyond
- visual line
- of sight,
- I spoke to it earlier, not interrupting customers by way of
- accessing their
- property, whether we have the right to do so or not,
- or it can be a disruptor,
- we wanna advance our capabilities here.
- And it allows for those few precious moments, if not hours
- at times, to get ahead of
- whatever the condition may be, a threat or not,
- and work with our partners and police, law enforcement,
- CAL FIRE, US Forest Service, other entities to let them know we have
- eyes on site,
- we know what's occurring, and we're here to help.
- And so this space of utilizing
- drones, this aerial technology, to have us react quicker and
- be nimble in events, whether planned or unplanned,
- is priority for us.
- We've inspected our assets. We're over 100-year-old company for good
- reason,
- primarily by ground our entire history.
- This is a game changer for us.
- We're progressing in the space,
- but we've got to stay ever forward-looking,
- have unorthodox thinking, be geniuses in this space in partnership
- and
- collaboration, and I just appreciate the opportunity to
- be here and actually see
- some of what we're doing and looking forward to contributing.
- Awesome. I mean, one of the things that's interesting to
- me,
- I think the inspection applications within energy utilities are pretty
- intuitive. It makes sense that you can use a drone to get up there
- and, and get a
- vantage point that you wouldn't otherwise see.
- One of the things that we've learned a lot working with PG
- and o- others is that
- there's a really important real-time component to it.
- Like, if the power goes out, if there's a potential issue,
- in a lot of ways it's
- similar to public safety. You wanna get eyes on scene as quickly-
- Mm-hmm
- ... as possible to get the information you
- need to, to dispatch and respond
- appropriately. Um, it's one of the areas where I think
- there's interesting overlap
- from our standpoint and our products and how we serve, serve both sets of
- customers. Um, so I've been in- invited by our panelists to not
- avoid the, uh, the difficult questions.
- Yeah.
- Um, one of the ones that comes up all the time in law
- enforcement-
- Why do I get the difficult ones?
- [laughs]
- [laughs]
- I'm sure there's come, some coming this way.
- [laughs]
- Yeah. You know, one, one of the things that,
- that comes up frequently in, in drones
- in law enforcement
- is what's the community reception gonna be?
- What's the community response gonna be?
- Um, how do you think about that with NYPD? You know, you've got 8.5 million people.
- It's a big community. Might be the biggest city community in the
- world.
- How do you guys think about that?
- Well, look, our community, wh- who is our community?
- The people who complain too much? Well, I wanna speak to the community that we
- serve. As long as you're transparent with the
- community-
- Mm
- ... you're honest with the community, and, and you describe and, and
- identify how you're doing, how you're doing it,
- and how you wanna do and keep them
- safe, the community I serve is all for it.
- The fringes, if you will, the people complaining about other
- motives, the politics
- is I'll leave that to the elected officials, okay?
- The community I serve, the people I know in New York City,
- they're on, they're on board. Again, I'll say it again, public safety.
- Everybody wants their block
- in New York City to be safe so they can go about their business, and that's, and
- that's the name, name of the game. So just, again,
- transparency.
- Mm-hmm.
- Letting them know what's going on, showing them.
- You know, the visual is so powerful to see what we can do with
- these drones.
- And in New York City, we take every opportunity
- in our agency under our police commissioner,
- under our mayor to control the
- narrative. We are no longer gonna let the narrative
- be dictated to us.
- That's right.
- We're gonna dictate the narrative, and we're playing offense,
- and we're gonna do it
- right,
- but we're gonna keep our city safe, and that's the bottom line.
- Let's go.
- Yeah.
- My guy.
- I mean, one of, one of the things that I... Yeah.
- [audience clapping] You,
- you can kind of understand some concern, like the idea of police using drones can
- be, you know, are they gonna be invading our privacy?
- What does this mean?
- But when peop- when you really see the use cases
- and what, what folks are doing
- with drones, I mean, it's just transformative stuff for public
- safety.
- Like, being able to perform sear- search and rescue missions, you know,
- find the, the missing bodies that you mentioned. I mean, these
- are the...
- And I think we've seen this over and over again, where
- when people see the details
- of what you're actually doing with the product and the impact it has, it, it- You
- know, not that there aren't legitimate concerns,
- but it totally transforms
- the perspective. So I think the, the proactive and transparent approach
- really
- seems to be the, the winning one here.
- Right. The narrative, we're not going over your backyard
- randomly-
- Right
- ... see if you're using Boy's head versus
- Oscar Mayer. We're not doing that.
- All right? We are not.
- [laughs]
- But that's the, that's the false narrative that we have,
- we have to combat daily,
- right? So we're not, we're not doing it.
- Yeah.
- Uh, we're not flying over randomly, "Hey, let's just go fly the drones."
- [laughs]
- Emergency situations, public safety. We're a dynamic agency.
- We have to move fast, hour to hour. Things are always happening.
- Yeah.
- And, uh, you know, we're gonna control that narrative.
- And, and, Adam, if I may real quick, to Chief's point,
- through
- partnership and greater use,
- we as utility providers, I'm representing Pacific Gas Electric, the
- utility providers in the state of California that are in this area
- are helping
- enable the narrative that you just spoke to
- that needs to change and
- be on offense because we're in the communities doing asset inspection,
- doing outage
- response. And I will tell you, the first, um,
- sight of a drone by some customers, if not, are, "Get it out of
- here. Don't want it. What are you doing?" And it's about talking,
- leading with love, leading with empathy and saying, "Look,
- this allows me to
- stay on this side of the street, fly over your house to every easement,
- take
- a look at our distribution assets without having to have you put your dog away or
- disrupt anything you may th- have ongoing." And this technology
- makes us more efficient, more productive. It's safer.
- And then when Chief and the teams come through for a real
- emergency, something that
- actually needs emergency response right now, and God bless them for it-
- Mm
- ... that conversation's already had.
- So we aren't in every community yet, but through this collaboration, through
- air, police, utilities, we're
- starting to purposely be intrusive in
- changing the narrative that this technology is helping
- provide safety and the life-saving commodity that we're speaking about.
- Yeah. I think what I might have heard there
- is a commitment to put Skydio drones in
- all of your future communications material.
- [laughs]
- You know, I knew the tough questions were coming.
- I think now. I think it's a good idea.
- May- maybe if you have it at 49 in red instead
- of that Giants blue, we might, you
- know. [laughs]
- Might be sponsored in stock, stock options.
- You know, that's-
- I think, I think you just placed an order.
- We, we continue to part... It with all, with...
- We have about 50 of, uh, of your, of your products, uh,
- on property currently.
- We started about 12. Uh, I will say it's a collaboration.
- It's an effort.
- It's a work in session. We're in the lab together,
- as you would say it.
- Uh, and the one little bit of, of opportunity, if I may,
- on behalf of a few of the
- coworkers, is just
- be receptive to feedback. This is your space.
- We know you're the experts and the pioneers.
- And I really should put quotes on that because you truly are pioneers here.
- We're the operators,
- right? Let's work collaborative together.
- There's a saying that engineers want to be in charge.
- Operators are.
- I think we both are, but we've got to have a- our ears open.
- We've got to be curious, we've got to be nimble,
- and we got to continue to advance
- our capabilities collectively. So whether that's purchases or not,
- I know we're
- already in the boat working on things, so thank you.
- Awesome. I'm in charge, just to be clear.
- [laughs]
- That's it. That's it.
- As, as the person in charge, I'll say to our team,
- "Let's make sure we listen to
- PG&E's feedback."
- [laughs]
- Uh, so-
- Adam, let me jump on that. A couple of quick, quick thoughts.
- I really love, first of all, three passionate guys that care about
- getting it done.
- Yes, sir.
- I mean, no joke, we care that this works.
- And the reason that it's easy to love this organization
- is because you do, too, and that matters to us.
- So I wanted to share that one thought.
- The other thought is when we go out and do public engagement
- every time, and we do it because it's rural,
- when we go to a town, there is 150 people
- in the city hall, and that's the town, and they're concerned
- about privacy-
- Mm-hmm
- ... property rights, all that business. What about drones? The whole deal.
- When my team and I go out there and sit down with them with a drone
- and we say,
- "When you have a child lost in the state park,
- do you care how we find him?
- In no way do you care."
- Right.
- "You just want him found.
- If that drone gets the job done, fine and good." When I lived in
- New Mexico, I had my pickup truck stolen.
- I'm from Kansas. I don't talk cool like the chief.
- [laughs]
- I don't work for a big company like Jason.
- I'm just a guy that likes privacy and big open spaces
- and shooting guns and all kinds of fun things.
- Don't we all?
- But what I don't-
- [laughs]
- Yes, sir.
- If there's an empty segment after this, that's where we're probably gonna be.
- [laughs]
- But I'll tell you, every single time that somebody comes and talks to me about
- privacy, I say, "I don't want any part of somebody
- monitoring my property,"
- until one second after I walked out into my sidewalk and said,
- "My truck's been stolen."
- Mm.
- And now I want satellites retasked-
- [laughs]
- ... and, you know, Special Forces coming in with their
- blackout helicopters to
- get my pickup back. So what's the no joke deal?
- What's the value that a drone delivers?
- It, it's about the value, and nobody cares about
- that drone being in their backyard when it's there to save a kid,
- something like
- that that's super important to them.
- Mm-hmm.
- So we're grateful for the opportunity.
- Want to hear our saying in New York City?
- I do.
- I don't know if I do.
- G- GSD. You know what GSD-
- GS- we love GSD.
- Adam's referring-
- Ground, ground sample distance?
- Not ground.
- [laughs]
- As I told, I told Adam, yes, I only got a 850 on my SATs.
- I don't know what the hell that means.
- Oh.
- Did you, did you see the sensor section?
- Yeah. Uh-
- I know what GSD is
- ... G- GSD in this room is get stuff done.
- At the bar, you can replace the S with something else.
- Sure.
- But at the bottom line, you know-
- Yeah
- ... get it done.
- Yeah.
- Yeah. All right. Let's, uh, let's wind down here.
- Maybe just a couple words on the future. You know, what are you excited about?
- Mm.
- Where do you see this going the next 5 or 10 years? You can go last.
- I, I put you on the spot for last.
- I can go last?
- So, yeah. Let's, let's start with you, Bob.
- I'll go first. Sure. So
- a dear friend years ago in Dallas, Texas, was named Zig Ziglar.
- He's a public speaker, exceptional motivational guy.
- He talks about training fleas.
- Has anybody heard the story about training fleas?
- If you take fleas and put them in a jar and put a lid on
- them, they will jump to the... They, they jump about eight inches.
- Mm-hmm.
- Fun fact I just learned up, had to know the number.
- I like that.
- They bang to the top of the lid. Hit their head, hit the lid, hit the lid,
- hit the
- lid. Finally,
- they take off the lid and set it back out there.
- With hundreds of fleas inside that jar, not a single one of them
- will jump out
- because they've learned what it takes to bang into that ceiling and say,
- "There's no getting out." And so with the lid open, every
- single one of them will die in place.
- That's a picture of large organizations.
- That's a picture of government. That's a picture of,
- we know what we knew,
- so what do we know next?
- My hope is we can poke holes in those lids and introduce
- and have the partnerships with innovative companies that will actually reach
- out and convince us that it's
- safer to spend that government tax dollar on
- the new thing than it was the old thing that was dumber,
- slower, and less effective. So that's my hope.
- That's our message that we want to get out there.
- And surrounded by passionate cats like this, I think we can get it done.
- I'm gonna go buy some fleas later.
- [laughs]
- Do it. Just to...
- [laughs]
- So the opposite of that, we want smarter, more effective, and faster.
- Yes, sir.
- That sounds like a great tagline for the product.
- I think it's good.
- I, I think I heard, heard that before.
- All right.
- Yeah. [laughs]
- Chief Shell, what do you see in the future with drones?
- All right, so I'm just look at the presentation far
- from the back, we'll talk,
- we'll talk X10, what I'm envisioning in my, in my head.
- Just the-
- Oh, boy
- ... the speed to get up, the, the duration it could be up, the
- distance it can go, the thermal and the license. This
- is all crime-fighting tools.
- Uh, I foresee in the very near future, you know, what's long-term, what's
- short-term. Uh, we're probably gonna train our recruits in
- the police academy
- to use, how to use handheld drones.
- I, I think, uh, in the near future we'll have them.
- I have 77 police precincts.
- I envision our precincts having at least one plus.
- And, and the, and for the law enforcement in the room,
- the classic scenario would
- be you chase someone, they go into a backyard, you gotta
- keep yourself safe. You, you surround the yard if you will,
- you surround the block.
- I see a quick deployment of drone. I see the thermal.
- I see the f- finding where this person is, and I see calling in
- our, um, well, we have SWAT emergency service unit to,
- to keep us
- safe, to get the job done. No one gets hurt.
- The community doesn't get hurt, and we move on.
- That, that's the most simplistic way I could see
- it.
- Our agency answers a staggering almost 10 million calls for service.
- 10 million.
- Uh, we talked about response times with the
- drones.
- I envision our drones being deployed to some of our quality-of-life calls
- for service.
- Mm-hmm.
- To see... Get there quick, see what the situation
- is, and are we needed? Is that another agency?
- Mm-hmm.
- I see, you know, for those in the room of law enforcement,
- again, you know,
- ShotSpotter technology when we get alerted that there's gunfire,
- uh, uh, guns being shot, to get th- get there quickly with the
- autonomous drone. This is more the future, right? Near future.
- Near future.
- The auto- the autonomous drone getting there
- and just giving us a bird's-eye view
- what's going prior to us getting, getting there for safety and
- investigative value. Uh, a red cough lane, and he, and he
- captures that plate from 800 feet,
- game changer.
- Yeah.
- So we might not get there, uh, as quick as we want to be for various
- circumstances,
- but for our detectives to solve that crime-
- Yeah
- ... again, you, uh, these are a game changer. Th- these
- are the game changer.
- This is technology. You know, let's get to it.
- And you know with the-
- Great vision
- ... with the number of cops,
- that's a terrible... Law enforcement officers across our state,
- we have about
- 5,000.
- It's the one guy in the county, it might be the county sheriff
- that shows up, and
- he's the only one. We're working real hard,
- and the X10's exciting
- because as well as the other products.
- We just changed out all of the drones in Kansas
- to this brand of drones, to Skydio drones, because
- it was a risk management choice.
- Is it safer to fly a drone that will keep itself
- from crashing into things? Uh, yes.
- That's a good government choice.
- [laughs]
- Do we send somebody to six months of aviation training, or do we buy a
- drone that will just not crash itself? Hallelujah.
- Beyond line of sight operations is doable-
- Yeah
- ... in our country.
- And if we get our law enforcement guys to be able to do that with
- drones that won't crash into things, that's just a good
- government choice to make. So we're making it.
- Might not be here next year, but we'll see.
- [laughs]
- But I don't think that's true. I think we're gonna demonstrate with your
- help that
- this th- these kind of things are possible.
- You know, I just want to mention, uh, to fly a helicopter in New York City-
- Mm
- ... it's $1,750 an hour.
- That's right.
- Mm.
- The drone, you just need a signal and a charge.
- Yeah.
- There's, there's a cost effectiveness, a cost, uh, effectiveness also.
- We, we love competing against helicopters.
- [laughs]
- Yeah.
- Jason?
- Adam, can I, can I bring it home on thinking
- differently, like what the future is?
- C- at least from a,
- from Pacific Gas and Electric and the coworkers I'm representing
- and the peer
- utilities. Again, interdependence matters.
- What I saw today, the capability's there-
- Completely
- ... if not already. When you turned the lights off in here,
- the drone flew around.
- So
- I'd like to see it proven without exception going
- forward.
- But beyond that, here, I'll give you a challenge for you pioneers
- in the room.
- San Francisco is made up of primarily underground electric equipment.
- We have vaults the size of this room that have large transformers in them.
- Here's what I want. Here's what we want.
- And I have a
- gentleman I love, he's the best man in my wedding,
- introduced me to now my wife.
- It's a cable splicer in San Francisco.
- And every day he goes into a vault, whether it's routine or emergency,
- not knowing
- the conditions.
- So Adam-
- I want underground drone inspections, full
- AI, letting my brother-in-law know,
- who's a coworker at PG&E, while he's getting his gear on,
- his Publix, his,
- his PPE, which is, you know, uh, equipment that you have before you go into
- enclosures.
- And this drone's able to go in after whatever incident we may have had, or
- just routine maintenance, and say, "You've got an overheating transformer, a
- failed splice,
- a biohazard,
- and a couple of rungs on that ladder missing."
- So that they have situational awareness.
- I know we got it, you got it, and those in this room and across
- the industry in this space have the capability to bring us beyond visual line
- of
- sight, above ground, blue sky conditions, and some
- challenging, you know, infrastructure. I got that. Think differently.
- Let's go underground. I want to be the u- we want to be a utility that's able to
- provide genius thinking in spaces beyond what just the eyes
- tell us that may be capable.
- [applause]
- All right. Well, the, the gauntlet has been thrown down.
- [applause]
- Wow.
- All right. Thank, thank you to our three panelists.
- It's a-
- You know what I want is a selfie. Can we get a selfie?
- Oh, all right. Let's get a selfie.
- Let's go.
- Yeah.
- Come on.
- And I, I need a drone that can deliver an 18 pack.
- [laughs]
- [laughs] Dude.
- [applause]
- All right. What, what are we doing here?
- Yeah, yeah, let's do... You guys mind?
- All right.
- Come on.
- You guys want to hop in?
- I don't know.
- Oh.
- Oh, we can't... Can we get the audience lights on? No?
- [laughs]
- All right. All right.
- All right.
- Hey, let's go.
- [applause]
- Thank you.
- All right. Thank you.
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
- [applause]
- Great job.
- Okay. Good job, guys.
- [applause]
- All right. We've cove- covered a lot of ground.
- Kind of curious where we are in the slide deck.
- I think we're about to find out.
- Uh,
- so we've talked about a lot of different barriers that come up, and you've heard us
- allude to this a couple of different times.
- One of the ones that can be the most scary,
- especially to folks who aren't familiar
- with drones, is the regulatory landscape.
- And I think that a lot of drone companies have kind of used regulation as a
- punching bag. Like, it's very easy to say like, "Oh,
- we'd be doing X, Y, Z thing if
- only the regulator would let us." At Skydio, we've always had a very optimistic
- view on regulations. We've seen enormous progress over the last
- 10 years.
- By and large, I think the regulations have been
- reasonable given the state of
- technology, and now we're seeing technology progress.
- We're also seeing regulatory progress.
- So a quick call back to the product.
- So X10 is really designed as a BVLOS machine.
- It's got connectivity options. It can fly over 5G.
- It can go everywhere you have cell coverage.
- We have remote flight deck, so you can fly it remotely.
- We've got the autonomy to fly it remotely in a trustworthy way, as you saw with the
- live DFR demo. Uh, and as a last resort, as a final backup, it's got a
- parachute if you think you need that.
- So the hardware and the product is all set for BVLOS
- operations. Uh, the other thing that we're doing as a company
- is partnering with
- our customers and supporting them in getting them the regulatory permissions
- they
- need. And we're fortunate at Skydio to have
- really one of the world's foremost
- experts on small electric drone operations, regulatory
- compliance, and all the aerospace issues involved.
- Many of you have probably already worked with her.
- I'm, I'm really excited to welcome Jen Player
- to the stage to tell you about the
- work that we're doing.
- [cheers]
- [applause]
- Thanks, Adam, and thanks to all of you for being here
- today.
- Lots of talk about, about BVLOS.
- Well, the current aviation regulations still
- require
- that drones be operated within visual line of sight, and that literally
- means that the pilot needs to be able to see the drone.
- Now, you also heard Adam describe the X10 as a
- BVLOS
- machine. It was built to fly beyond visual line of
- sight.
- And earlier, you heard about Skydio Dock.
- It was built for remote operations.
- So how do you operate Skydio drones the really, the way
- you really want to, the way you really need to,
- remotely, beyond visual line of sight, from across your site,
- across the state, or even across the country?
- Well, that's where the Skydio regulatory team
- comes in.
- We're unlocking BVLOS, and we're doing that by working with our
- customers and with regulators on advanced operational approvals,
- also called waivers.
- Since we stood up Skydio Regulatory Services, we've been hard at work
- helping dozens of customers with BVLOS approvals.
- In the recent months, we've helped Dominion Energy with an
- approval to
- inspect its energy generation facilities.
- We've helped Southern Company with a enterprise-wide approval for
- Dock drones, and we've secured a national scale
- approval in
- Japan.
- Now, [clears throat] these approvals don't
- require a lot of extra people
- on site. They don't require costly, complex equipment.
- They're really practical to implement, and they represent a significant
- step forward in scaled operations.
- You don't need to be intimidated by aviation regulations, because Skydio
- has your back. My team was also built for BVLOS,
- and we're here to help you navigate the regulations and get the approvals that you
- need.
- Now,
- there are a couple of elements to a remote BVLOS approval that are really
- important.
- You need a low latency connection to the drone.
- You need awareness of the weather and the air traffic in the area where the
- drone is being operated.
- That's why we've amended our Dock offering with a sensor
- package that delivers to you a BVLOS-ready solution.
- Um, this solution, this, uh, sensor bundle,
- includes a weather station-
- And that helps you monitor things like winds, temperature, density, altitude,
- parameters that are important for aviation compliance.
- It includes an ADS-B in receiver. That's a sensor that can detect air
- traffic.
- If you don't have infrastructure Wi-Fi on your site,
- we offer a 5G capable hardened appliance for
- cellular backhaul. And if cellular isn't an option,
- then we can support a satellite-based solution.
- All of this comes together with our dock deployment and
- training services to help you get up and running quickly,
- and with our regulatory services to help you get approvals and to help
- you build professional grade UAS program documentation.
- So when you're ready to incorporate autonomous drones, remember that
- Skydio offers a complete solution:
- a smart, capable drone, a practical dock,
- amazing autonomy, and all the surfaces, services that you
- need to build a productive, safe, and scalable
- drone program.
- Thanks. I'm going to hand it back over to Adam.
- [audience applauding]
- All right.
- Thank you, Jen.
- All right, we're out there on the prairie. We're making great progress.
- We might be to Oregon, maybe we're headed to California.
- So we've got a great drone. It's got great sensors.
- It captures great data.
- We've got regulatory permission to fly wherever we need it.
- At Skydio, our goal is to build the world's best data capture
- platform and then
- work with industry leaders to bring together the end-to-end solutions.
- And another area where we've made huge investments is on the
- integration side of things. So getting the data
- that our drone capture into the
- systems that matter for you guys. To tell you more about that,
- we've got our head
- of technical partnerships, Gagan Kanwar.
- [audience applauding]
- Thanks, Adam. Hello, everyone. Uh, very excited to be here and, uh, big warm
- welcome to all of our customers and partners.
- Um, I joined Skydio in January, and when I started, I started
- talking to a lot of customers and partners to understand what they
- thought about
- Skydio and our integration capabilities.
- And the feedback I got consistently was, "We love Skydio.
- We think it's a great drone. We like the autonomy, but we wish you
- were a more open
- platform." Um, and so, uh, we spent the last, um, three or four
- months, uh, kind of working on that, digging into that.
- And as I talked to more customers, the feedback that I got, again, in terms
- of what customers really cared about in this area was that they wanted,
- one, to be able to integrate to a lot of
- different kinds of systems, because
- depending on the industry, whether it's law enforcement or utility
- or what have
- you, they'll have different endpoints that they care about.
- Second, uh, they, they wanted the ability to have a lot of
- flexibility in terms of
- how those integrations actually worked.
- So the use cases you have for, again, law enforcement might be very different
- from
- what you have for utility versus a department of transportation.
- And so we needed, needed to think about how do we build in
- flexibility beyond just
- the ability to integrate with a particular endpoint.
- Um, and then lastly, you know, some customers said, "You know,
- we have really
- complex, uh, scenarios. Uh, we don't really, uh,
- think you guys can do that for us. We just need access to APIs,
- and we want to
- build it ourself." Uh, this was a small number of customers,
- but again, we
- respected that and we wanted to provide a, a solution for them as well.
- So with all of that, we've been working really hard over the
- last six months to
- build a solution that we think you guys will like,
- and I'm very pleased to
- announce today Skydio Extend. So Skydio
- is now an open platform and, uh, Extend is
- basically a product that we're launching to solve the
- integrations problems for
- our customers. So let's talk about what Extend can help
- you do.
- The first thing is integration. So think of integrations as being a app
- store or a catalog of integrations and endpoints that Skydio will build and
- maintain over time. And that allows you to connect with a number
- of different kinds
- of systems, whether it's Esri SiteScan, AWS S3, um,
- IBM Maximo, or any number of systems going forward in
- the future.
- The second piece of this is workflows, and workflows is really where the magic
- happens. This is where you can create multi-step,
- multi-application, uh, workflows that connect the data,
- do useful things for you, notify people when certain actions
- are done, and all
- of that can be done with, with using workflows.
- Uh, we will, uh, also help you build and maintain these workflows if needed,
- and
- also create new integrations for you if needed as well.
- And then the last piece of this is developer tools, and this
- is really where
- we want to provide options for those customers that have very complex
- integration
- needs and also have the technical resources to take those on themselves.
- And so for them, we provide a full suite of APIs, webhooks,
- documentation, et
- cetera, that they can use to build very bespoke
- integrations and experiences.
- Um, so one thing I'll quickly mention here
- is that, you know, uh,
- integrations and, uh, Skydio Extend in particular is, uh, is
- just like autonomy. It's a Skydio first.
- So there is no other drone company that I'm familiar with that
- offers this capability of integrations and automations to
- its customers. So really excited to bring this all to you
- and to get this all in
- your hands very soon.
- So I want to walk through a very quick example.
- So imagine you're running a, a very large land survey
- and using Esri SiteScan
- as your photogrammetry engine and AWS S3 for cloud
- storage. So in the old world, you know, you might be ha-- you might have
- pilots running around with SD cards, uploading images, sending emails to
- people, uh, walking into offices, driving back to their, uh, uh,
- facilities or offices. And with the new world,
- with Skydio Extend, once
- the drone lands and connects to Wi-Fi, that media automatically makes its
- way into Skydio Cloud. Once it's in Skydio Cloud, Skydio Extend
- knows that for this particular kind of mission, you want to send the data
- both to S3 and to Esri SiteScan. And so first it
- creates a mission in Esri SiteScan because that's your container for this kind of a
- project. It then takes all the images that it's collected, sends those over
- to SiteScan, sends all the media over to S3.
- When it's all done, it starts... It, it initiates the processing in SiteScan so
- it can start building a model, and it notifies your GIS teams and your
- IT teams that the data is, is ready in the systems
- and it's ready f-for
- them to start working on it. So this is, again, a huge game changer because
- when you think about how do you scale your drone programs, uh, this combined with
- BVLOS and combined with, uh, Dock and Remote Operations will
- really allow you to scale your drone program and, and get it to a, a factor
- of ten or twenty X, uh, larger and more capable than, than what it is
- today. Um, and then, you know, one final note, if you are
- interested in talking to us about integrations or about your integration
- needs in
- particular, uh, please feel free to reach out to us.
- We'd love to talk to you.
- Reach out to us through your CSMs, through your SEs and,
- and we'd be happy to have
- a conversation. So, um, I mentioned Esri SiteScan and,
- and we have a
- very special guest here today from Esri.
- Um, so everyone please give a warm welcome to
- Nico Bonefu, Senior Product Manager
- of Esri ArcGIS Reality.
- [audience applauding]
- Nico.
- Nico, thank you for joining us here at Ascend.
- Uh, maybe you could start by just telling us a
- little bit about, um, Esri and, and,
- uh, ArcGIS Reality, um, uh, as well.
- Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited about this new
- partnership between
- Esri and, and Skydio. Esri is a, a 50-year-old
- company. We, we like to say we enable the science of
- where.
- We help organizations from defense, government
- organizations, from national agencies to local
- government, private
- organizations and utilities, natural resources, AEC,
- and science and research organizations make sense of
- geospatial data, understanding and extracting information
- from location data, which can be a variety of data,
- including the data we
- collect with drones.
- The area I'm focused on is, is our reality mapping capabilities.
- ArcGIS Reality is a suite of products that allows
- you to take images from satellite, from airplanes, and of
- course drones, like the beautiful X10, and turn them into high
- definition maps, 3D models, that then feed your
- GIS system to create, um, a living digital twin.
- Great. Well, thank you for that. And, you know, you, you've, uh, been a pilot,
- you've been a flight instructor, you're obviously a drone enthusiast, and,
- and now
- you're a product manager at Esri, so you've seen a lot of drones.
- So I'd love to get your take on X10. What do you think about X10,
- and do you think
- it's gonna be, uh ... it's gonna meet the needs of Esri
- customers?
- Yeah. I'm, I'm real excited. I think you've hit the mark.
- Uh,
- it checks a, a lot of the boxes that I hear from our users.
- "I need a US-made drone. I need NDAA compliant,
- blue UAS compliant.
- I need more sensor options." We have thermal now, we have
- different, uh, RGB sensors, higher resolution, larger
- sensor itself,
- and also higher accuracy. So a lot of our users
- are trying to collect
- less ground control point for their survey work, in some cases no control point at
- all, so it's great to see the RTK, uh, PPK module that'll be available
- on X10.
- Thank you. And, and when you think about the integration we've
- built with SiteScan,
- um, I'd, I'd love to get your take on why do you
- think this will be relevant to
- mutual customers?
- Well, I think it, it improves efficiency.
- So we already have a lot of, of shared users that are flying Skydio
- vehicles today and, and bringing that data into ArcGIS.
- But there's manual steps, as you shared, and I think with this integration we're,
- we're, uh, eliminating some of those, uh, barriers to,
- to sharing data. We're getting rid of the SD card
- essentially, and making
- a, a seamless data flow that, that'll help, um, all of you
- go from data collection to, to insights and in turn
- action much faster.
- Got it. And, and yeah, we're, we're ...
- We definitely wanna get the insights faster for our customers.
- That's been a big north star for us as we, as we built this product.
- One final question. Um, you know, we're starting the partnership with Esri
- by
- building an integration to SiteScan.
- Um, would love to get your thoughts on, you know, what are the broader
- opportunities here for a partnership between Skydio and Esri?
- Yeah. I think this integration's just the start.
- Uh, we can definitely deepen the integrations
- with, with the broader ArcGIS system.
- Uh, one area that, that excites me is, you know, from what, what the team showed
- today with the, uh, onboard intelligence on X10 and the AI
- capabilities to detect those defects, how do we take it an extra step and know
- precisely where that defect is in, in 3D space?
- Through geospatial video we'll be able, able to, uh,
- identify precise locations and, and share this across a,
- an organization to
- take rapid action.
- Great. Well, thank you so much for that, Nico.
- I really appreciate you coming up from San Diego.
- And, uh, for the audience, if, if you're gonna be here tomorrow, uh,
- we're
- having a, a deep dive session over lunch on, um,
- Skydio
- Extend and also on the integration with SiteScan.
- If you're here tomorrow, please join us over lunch.
- We'd love to tell you more and take your questions if you have any.
- Um, and again, thank you once again to our partners for
- attending.
- It's really great to have you here and I look forward to meeting you. Thanks.
- Thank you. [audience applauding]
- All right. We're almost there. What happens next?
- So the best way to understand X10 is to get hands-on with it,
- and for those of you here live, right after this we're gonna head up to
- the
- Presidio
- and we're gonna fly some X10s. So you'll get the chance to get hands-on,
- see what
- it can do, ask questions of our team, learn all about the
- product. Uh, for those of you who aren't here live,
- X10 is
- going on tour, so if you missed Taylor Swift this
- is the next best thing.
- [laughs]
- [laughs]
- Uh, so we've got a list of, of cities and dates up here.
- If you go to skydio.com/tour you can check it out, you can register.
- We'd love to hear from you, and we really encourage everybody to take
- advantage of
- it. It's a great way to get to know the
- product better and also to get to know
- Skydio better and see if this is a company you wanna work with.
- So we aspire to be in the business of building successful drone
- programs, not just building drones.
- And as a company
- we know we're not perfect. Sometimes we make mistakes, but one of the
- things that I hope really defines us is our persistence.
- We stick with it, we listen, we learn, we adapt,
- we improve, and X10 is a reflection of everything we've
- learned over the last 10 years building autonomous flying systems,
- everything we've learned from all of you, our customers.
- And ultimately what will define its success is not the capabilities or the
- specs,
- but the impact that it has for all of you,
- and that journey is just getting started today.
- I wanna thank our customers, everybody that bet on Skydio
- that enabled us to get to this point, and I also wanna congratulate our
- incredible
- team at Skydio that made all of this possible.
- I'm up here representing the work of hundreds of people
- that have been working for
- years to bring all of this to life. Thank you all.
- [audience applauding]
- [upbeat music]
Watch Time
2 Hrs 16 Mins 5 Secs