Autonomous drones have a huge amount of potentially valuable use cases, but even if the drones are smart enough to start doing their job on their own, they need to come home to recharge. Skydio today announced a new series of docks that represent the next step in the company’s journey to deployable autonomous flying worker bees.
The company claims its newly launched Dock and Dock Lite deserve a swarm of superlatives, describing them as the “smallest, lightest and smartest cloud-connected drone base stations available on the market today.” The docking solutions are designed to give the company’s customers the ability to perform site inspections, as well as monitoring, mapping and situational awareness tasks, anywhere in the world at any time. Relying on the new Remote Ops software, the AI models to keep the drones working, the systems can work both indoors and outdoors.
The selling point is obvious; skilled, licensed drone operators who can operate out of line of sight are expensive. It is very attractive to be able to operate them remotely instead of having to bring them on site. Skydio drones in Dock and Dock Lite can fly with a single remote operator or autonomously.
The new Skydio dock. Image Credits: Skydio.
“The concept of remote-controlled drones is incredibly compelling,” Skydio CEO Adam Bry said in a press statement. “It’s attracted a ton of activity from startups and established manual drone companies, but it’s never going to work the way customers want — let alone scale to address real-world applications that solve today’s needs — unless you can rely on it that the drone flies itself. And making drones that are smart enough to fly themselves is our core focus.”
The group of startups Bry is referring to could be Matternet and Airobotics, both of which have raised significant funds and started deploying autonomous drone solutions in recent years.
“Skydio Dock and Skydio Dock Lite, combined with our Remote Ops software, deliver autonomous capabilities for our customers, whether they are monitoring their warehouses, inspecting a security perimeter, or assessing infrastructure after a natural disaster — finally delivering the promise of efficient, scalable remote operations ”, says Bry.
Skydio’s new Remote Ops user interface. Image credit: Skydio
Deploying drones in compliance with the FAA is not trivial, and it’s encouraging to see that Skydio has a regulatory team to help its customers advocate for remote operations, obtain approvals and necessary blessings from aviation regulators.
