Startup Skydio released a new drone called the R1 for $2,499, which it says delivers “on the promise of the self-flying camera.”.
Skydio is founded by Adam Bry (CEO) and Abe Bachrach (CTO). The cofounders met as grad students at MIT in 2007, and have been working on autonomous flying systems for over a decade. Bry's final project was building a modern airplane that could fly around on its own. The R1 is a culmination of Bry and his team’s years of research in the field, and Bry’s desire to get the best aerial footage possible. “If you can use the camera app on your phone you can use the drone,” he said.
Adam Bry and Abe Bachrach were the first full-time engineering hires for Google’s Project Wing, the X lab’s drone delivery initiative, where they applied their existing expertise in autonomous flight systems.
The Skydio R1 has 13 cameras spaced all around its body, including cameras that look down and up. To process all the visual data, it uses an Nvidia TX1 GPU with 256 cores. The body is made from aluminium and carbon fiber. Each drone comes with two batteries good for about 16 minutes of flight time each, along with 64 gigabytes of on-board storage for the 4k gimbaled camera.
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