Overnight, Skydio has released new updates for its Skydio 2+ Enterprise and Skydio X2 drones, and its powerful Skydio Cloud management software. The update brings a number of improvements and new features across the board.
Less cognitive load
The manual drones that dominate fleets today are holding their operators back. They require operators to be so cautious in flight that it makes it more difficult to complete their missions and carry high-cost sensors on low-reliability airframes.
Autonomous Skydio drones with vision-based navigation and obstacle avoidance alleviate the pilot burden, enable confident flight, and protect operators’ investments. In today’s release, we are excited to announce Skydio Scout — an autonomous flight skill that gives operators awareness without needing to actually fly the drone.
90 seconds to intel
When a call comes into a tactical team, intel is often ambiguous and needs refinement. Instant situational awareness on arrival can help responders observe and orient themselves more effectively to promote mission success. Skydio X2 can be deployed in under 90 seconds.
The quick deploying nature of Skydio X2 saves time and accelerates decision making. Today’s new Quick Launch feature allows the pilot to launch without holding a controller and removes steps in the launch process to get the drone in the air faster.
Hands-off team awareness
Situational awareness that is rapidly shared team-wide is critical to mission success in tactical environments. Today, we are excited to announce Skydio Scout, Team Awareness Kit (TAK) Integration, Streaming, and Live Flights — all with a simple software update for our Autonomy Enterprise and Cloud customers.
These features further the capabilities of Skydio drones for improved communication and context, especially for emergency situations in real-time leading to quicker resolutions, allowing teams to identify issues or gauge the severity of an emergency to provide more rapid response.
Skydio Scout
Skydio Scout is a dedicated skill which makes it easier to fly around and keep up with a tracked GPS position. Fly at a set distance and height from either the Skydio Enterprise Controller or the Skydio Beacon while on the move — all without having to manually operate the drone. Skydio’s unmatched obstacle avoidance makes for worry free flying while maintaining a set distance from the GPS location and camera direction, even without line of sight.
Skydio Scout makes your operations easier in a few key ways:
- The Skydio Scout skill does not require the drone to "look" at its tracked GPS position. That means you can place the drone anywhere in 3D space and position the camera to focus on what you care about, all while following the tracked GPS position.
- Skydio Scout lets you seamlessly reposition the drone while a tracked subject or GPS position is in motion. No need to position the camera while manually trying to keep up with a moving subject in congested environments.
- Scout makes it easy to reposition the drone and keep eyes around a moving subject.
TAK integration
TAK (Team Awareness Kit) is an application that allows multiple inputs from GPS enabled devices to be displayed in one central location. Having centralised location information from many different devices gives team members a real-time view of the area that allows for better coordination amongst teams.
Now with the Skydio Enterprise Controller, users can connect to the online or offline TAK network, giving teammates on the ground access to the drones live video feed and location. This allows for precision targeting, surrounding land formation intelligence, situational awareness, navigation, and data sharing.
This new situational awareness capability allows users to see where team members are (which reduces friendly fire incidents and helps with coordinating movements). TAK enables collaboration across multiple devices such as GPS beacons that were previously unable to communicate when on joint missions because they use different equipment, radio frequencies or encryption.
Skydio Streaming
Live Streaming provides improved communication and context, especially for chaotic or emergency situations in real-time to off-site first-response teams, executives, and command centres. Live Streaming helps with faster response times and quicker resolutions, allowing teams to identify issues or gauge the severity of an emergency to provide the appropriate response.
Skydio Streaming brings this crucial capability to Skydio drones — enabling users to share and view a live video stream of what the drone is capturing during flight.
Streaming provides a secure real-time video feed from a drone’s camera view to team members, decision-makers, or emergency response teams. The livestream is viewable from mobile or desktop devices. Easily livestream from Skydio 2, 2+ or X2E to Skydio Cloud to access the drone's camera video feed.
Live flights
Get critical information about where all the drones in your fleet are located in real time. With Skydio Live Flights, your command centre can securely access live telemetry and location data from drones, enabling them to make better decisions about how to complete the mission.
You can learn more about all the updates via the release notes below:
