Skydio quadcopter won’t get lost in the forest

Modern drone for aero surveillance are very good in open field but the majority of them do not navigate good in case of any obstacles like tree branches. For safety reasons manufacturers often limit the...

Modern drone for aero surveillance are very good in open field but the majority of them do not navigate good in case of any obstacles like tree branches. For safety reasons manufacturers often limit the minimum possible distance to trees and other difficult places, a drone is allowed to fly.

Skydio company has developed a quadcopter R1 which with the help of computer vision algorithm can independently follow the object even in the forest, easily flying around all the obstacles that arise.
Four screws of R1 are additionally protected by a special strong circuit. The main survey is performed by a 4K camera located at the front end of the case. 12 auxiliary cameras allow creating a 3D terrain map, which is calculated by the processor Jetson TX 1 from NVIDIA. Files are written to the internal memory of 64 GB.

Skydio showed the possibilities of R1 in a demonstration clip, on which the drone recognizes the moving person and flies after him, constantly keeping in focus.

Interestingly, flying over the sea at R1 is bad. This is due to the peculiarity of the algorithm, which does not very well recognize the constantly changing surface.

In the firmware of the drone, several modes are programmed, which can be controlled via a smartphone via a Wi-Fi network. Drone can be launched without a smartphone, in a completely offline mode, which is enabled by default.

Quadcopter, whose weight is 1 kg, speeds up to 40 kilometers per hour. Without charging the drone can fly just 16 minutes, so the kit includes two batteries.

The main disadvantage of development is the price. In the near future, Skydio will begin selling the $ 2500 drone.