PEAKLIFE

After four years of intense work, California-based autonomous drone start-up, Skydio has recently unveiled its R1 drone that is AI-powered, and is capable of flying on its own by viewing its surroundings in real time, and can capture videos on the 4k resolution. PEAKLIFE gives you all the details.

“We are entering a new age where computers aren’t just static objects that we tap on and read information from; computers will become mobile agents that act on our behalf in the world. We believe building intelligent machines that bring the creative capacity of software to life in the physical world is the opportunity of a generation; a future where they multiply human creativity and human possibility.”

This leading statement on the official Skydio website clears the focus and thought behind their autonomous drone start-up. The recent introduction of the self-flying drone, R1, has created a lot of buzz in the tech fraternity.

As the people at Skydio state, their goal is to constantly push the boundaries of what’s possible in this new world. This means imagining and building beyond what’s possible today and looking for opportunities to do new useful things for people. With that clarity, imagining the future with the self-flying drone has been made a possibility. Today when people think of drones, they think of unreliable things that crash all the time. The focus at Skydio has been to build a future of sleek, intelligent flying assistants.

How Skydio got here

Skydio comes from the lifelong passions of their co-founders who grew up steeped in aviation, robotics, and storytelling. They met as grad students at MIT, where they helped pioneer autonomous flight using onboard sensors.The inspiration for starting Skydio came from the enormous gap between the imagined promise of drones and what existing manually-flown products are capable of. From early on it was clear that getting to a compelling fully autonomous product would mean building hardware and software from the ground up –the project that was ambitious and at the same time very challenging, and yes also a lot of fun. Skydio’s team now includes world experts spanning AI, robotics, and consumer hardware products from places like Google, Apple, Tesla, and Oculus.

Visual Precision

Skydio has built a new kind of camera – one that flies itself by combining artificial intelligence, computer vision, and advanced robotics into a tool that anyone can pick up and use in minutes.The R1 is built with cutting-edge aerospace materials in a slim design that fits in your backpack. Featuring a lightweight anodized aluminum fuselage to dissipate heat from processing and carbon fiber rotor guards giving you peace of mind, the R1 is ready for your next adventure.

The R1 comes with a number of modes to choose from. It can follow, orbit, a film in profile perspective or from high above. It can even fly in front of the user, which sounds ideal for vloggers.The drone comes with two batteries that provide 16 minutes of flight time each. It also has 64 GB of internal storage for video footage. The R1 drone can be yours at a price of about $2,499.