Skydio团队非常关注无人机的自主性，它可以在跟踪目标和躲避障碍物的同时自行飞行。没有自动机场支持的飞机要靠人起飞降落，带回家充电。对于面向消费者应用领域来说，这不是什么大事。但对于工业界来说，因为人工昂贵，而且几乎总是忙于做其他事情，需要全自动或在最少的人参与的情况下完成任务。Skydio 2无人机依托美式邮箱的自动机场，伸缩机库能够防风防雨，可装在手提箱中运输，在几分钟内即可完成安装，你可以在几乎任何地方设置它，并让你的无人机可以长期独立完成任务。
飞行软件使无人机能够使用其六个机载摄像头建立一个360度的环境地图，躲避障碍物，拍摄周围环境，然后下来充电。无人机会降落在一个漏斗形小着陆平台上，机场内的电动手臂将无人机和着陆平台拉入机库进行充电。无人机将需要大约一个小时的充电时间，然后它就可以再次进行23分钟的飞行。
Skydio的自动机场是他们与DroneDeploy的第一个行业合作伙伴关系的一个组成部分，DroneDeploy是一个无人机地图平台。举个例子：你可以让一架skydio 2机场专用无人驾驶飞机驻留在一个建筑工地，然后它会在你需要的时候在工地上飞来飞去，并把一张工程进展的地图发给你。由于无人机总是在现场，随时待命，不需要专业飞手进行值守作业，它可以近乎实时地按需提供数据，作业数据的后处理也是自动化的，没有人参与意味着收集数据的成本足够低。美国联邦航空管理局（faa）可能不允许这样做。“根据现行条例，必须放弃超视距（bvlos）。我们认为，小型、轻型、安全的机场无人机具有先进的导航和防撞能力，是连续作业的最佳选择。我们的总体看法是，我们有责任确保该系统满足所有相关的安全和后勤问题，并与监管机构合作，负责任地推广这项技术。”首席执行官亚当•布莱说。
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The word “autonomy” in the context of drones (or really any other robot) can mean a whole bunch of different things. Skydio’s newest drone is probably the most autonomous drone that we’ve ever seen, in the sense that it can fly itself while tracking subjects and avoiding obstacles. But as soon as the Skydio 2 lands, it’s completely helpless, dependent on a human to pick it up, pack it into a case, and take it back home to recharge.
For consumer applications, this is not a big deal. But for industry, a big part of the appeal of autonomy is being able to deliver results with a minimum of human involvement, since humans are expensive and almost always busy doing other things.Today, Skydio is announcing the Skydio 2 Dock, a (mostly) self-contained home base that a Skydio 2 drone can snuggle up inside to relax and recharge in between autonomous missions, meaning that you can set it up almost anywhere and get true long-term full autonomy from your drone.Obviously, this is something that you can only do with the level of autonomy that you get with Skydio’s drone, because there’s no human pilot in the loop. From launch to landing on that alarmingly small platform, the drone can fly itself, although a remote human can step in if they want to at any point. once the drone is safely back in its carry-on-size weatherproof box, the drone spends about an hour recharging (you’ll need to plug the box in for this), and then it’s ready to go again for a 23-minute flight. Conceivably you could have the drone in the air every hour and a half collecting data for you.Skydio’s dock is an integral part of their first industry partnership with DroneDeploy, a mapping platform for drones. One potential application is that you could have a Skydio 2 drone living inside of a dock on a construction site, and then it’ll fly around the site as often as you need it to and send you back a map of how much things have progressed. Since the drone is always on-site and ready to go and doesn’t need to coordinate around a human operator, it can give you data on-demand in near-real time, or even after the fact: Tell it to fly every day, and then if you want to know what happened a week ago, the data will be there—no human involvement means that the cost to collect data is low enough that there’s no reason not to just do it pretty much constantly.Well, there’s one reason not to just do it all the time, which is that in the United States it’s probably not allowed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). CEO Adam Bry said that:“Under current regulations a Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) waiver would be required. We think that a small, light, safe drone with advanced navigation and collision avoidance is an excellent candidate for persistent autonomous operation. Our general view is that it’s our responsibility to establish that the system satisfies all relevant safety and logistical concerns, and work with regulators to roll this technology out responsibly.”
The FAA does grant a fair number of waivers like these, and as Bry says, Skydio has a platform that they can (hopefully) show to be safe and reliable enough that the FAA will be cool with it. But this is yet another case where regulation is falling behind technology, and it means that you can’t just start using this system for your business without having to jump through some government hoops first. This is the problem with being a company that’s so far ahead of the curve, I guess—sometimes you have to wait for the rest of the world to catch up.
Skydio also sees its dock system as being valuable for first responders, where real-time data from a drone can potentially save lives. Instead of someone on-scene having to devote their attention to drone management. In these cases, having a person intermittently in the loop to request specific views might be a more typical use case, but not having to worry about takeoff or landing or flying would make things much more efficient: you can just ask for the data you want and the drone will provide it, and it won’t bother you about anything else.
