US Drone Maker Skydio Announces X2 Drone is Now Shipping for Public Sector & Enterprise and Introduces Skydio Cloud

Press

Redwood City, Calif., May, 2021 – Skydio, the leading U.S. drone manufacturer and world leader in autonomous flight technology, today announced it is now shipping Skydio X2 drones with dual color/thermal sensors to defense, public sector and enterprise customers. A new X2 configuration with a single wide-angle color camera for close up inspections is now available for pre-order. In addition, the company also launched Skydio Cloud, a suite of advanced cloud services and robust APIs that unlock the power of drones for use at scale.

“Since our effort’s founding in 2014, drones have become an important part of our operations, and being able to leverage Skydio’s autonomous flight capabilities is a key part of safe deployment. Skydio X2’s combination of autonomy with dual color/thermal sensor, longer flight time and extended wireless range will help us conduct aerial inspections more efficiently and with greater detail than ever before,” said Todd Graetz, Director, RPA/UAS, BNSF Railway. “Furthermore, we have been testing Skydio Cloud as part of the early access program and we are excited by the prospect of managing our vehicles, closely tracking our usage metrics and operating our distributed fleet.”

Skydio X2 is now shipping

Winner of CES 2021 Best of Innovation award, Skydio X2 combines Skydio’s groundbreaking AI-powered autonomous flight and 360° obstacle avoidance capabilities with a new foldable, hardened and robust airframe. X2 provides longer flight time with up to 35 minutes on a single battery, extended wireless range (up to 6 km on commercial 5 GHz band, and up to 10 km on the restricted 1.8 GHz government band) and is ready for night-time operations. Skydio X2 pairs with the new robust Skydio Enterprise Controller for intuitive ground control operations. X2 has been selected as a trusted solution for the US Department of Defense and is a National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) compliant solution.

Skydio X2 is available in two versions: X2D for defense and federal agencies, and X2E for enterprises, first responders, and civilian agencies. Both X2D and X2E support the following configurations:

Color/Thermal dual sensor (shipping now): Features a 4K60 HDR color camera with 16x digital zoom and a narrow-angle lens (~46° HFOV) optimized for long range situational awareness, and FLIR® Boson 320×256 LWIR thermal sensor with 8x digital zoom.
Color (available for pre-order): Features a 4K60 HDR resolution color camera with 16x digital zoom and wide-angle focus (~80° HFOV) optimized for close-up inspections of infrastructure assets, scene reconstruction, and small area mapping. Ideal for autonomous inspections with Skydio 3D Scan.

By combining unparalleled ease of use and obstacle avoidance with a portable, lightweight yet robust airframe, Skydio X2 is rapidly becoming the solution of choice for a wide range of missions, including reconnaissance, search and rescue, security patrol, situational awareness, asset inspection, scene reconstruction and small area survey. In just three months since announcing pre-order availability, Skydio has seen demand for X2 spike approaching 1,000 systems reserved across defense, federal and state agencies, law enforcement and fire departments, construction, engineering, and transportation companies. In addition, Skydio X2 was selected by the US Army for final integration in the Short Range Reconnaissance (SRR) program of record.

Along with X2, Skydio has also begun shipping the new Skydio Enterprise Controller and Skydio Autonomy Enterprise Foundation for X2.

Price for Skydio X2 starts at $10,999 with Skydio Enterprise Controller and accessories.

Skydio Cloud unlocks autonomous connected flight operations

The operational complexity of current manual drone solutions goes beyond the lack of intelligent in-flight autonomy. Fleet and data management solutions still require manual shuttling of SD cards to upload data from the vehicle to the cloud or rely on brittle integrations through mobile apps that are hard to set up and maintain. Seamless integration with powerful cloud services is, however, critical to manage enterprise drone programs at scale, enabling users to monitor their fleet, maintain accurate records of every mission, access data, analyze it, and share it across the organization.

Skydio Cloud enables a new paradigm of autonomous connected flight operations by turning Skydio’s industry-leading autonomous drones into seamlessly and securely internet-connected devices with powerful cloud services. With Skydio Cloud, data can flow through the organization thanks to a set of robust APIs that allow direct integration with enterprise business systems for end-to-end management of flight operations, data analysis and security compliance.

Skydio Cloud runs on AWS – US Region cloud infrastructure, which ensures that data sent to the cloud never leaves the US, and include the following services:

Skydio Fleet Manager (available in limited early access) for federated management for distributed drone operations
Skydio Media Sync (available in limited early access) for seamless upload and management of flight media
Skydio Streaming (coming soon) for real-time video aerial intelligence from from any browser or mobile device
Skydio Remote Ops (coming soon) for groundbreaking teleoperation with the AI-powered obstacle avoidance of Skydio Autonomy

“Skydio Cloud unlocks the power of drones for organizational use at scale. It provides a foundation for connected flight operations, providing tight integration between hardware and cloud-based software, and unlocks a broad ecosystem of new partner solutions via an open API,” said Mike Ross, Senior Director of Product Management at Skydio. “Bridging the drone industry’s hardware-software gap, our flight operations will be truly connected to a platform that will enable users to quickly collect the data they need, to effectively search through it, and to easily share it throughout their organization.”

With the introduction of Skydio Cloud, Skydio becomes the first US drone manufacturer to provide an end-to-end solution that seamlessly integrates the industry leading autonomous drones with a secure, enterprise-grade cloud platform to manage fleets and data at scale.

Join Skydio on June 2 for a special event about the future of autonomous drone inspections

With the Early Access Program in full swing, Skydio 3D Scan is rapidly maturing. Skydio has shared demonstrations of the unprecedented results that beta customers have been achieving while testing the product garnering praise from drone industry publications . On June 2nd at 9am Pacific Time, in a special online broadcast event from the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, Skydio CEO, Adam Bry, will share additional details about 3D Scan and the company’s vision for autonomous drone inspection. Details about the event and registration can be found here.