Robotics

Inception Spotlight: New Skydio 2 Drone Powered by NVIDIA Jetson

Redwood City, California-based Skydio and member of NVIDIA’s startup accelerator, Inception, has just released the latest version of their AI capable GPU-accelerated drone, Skydio 2. 

Comprised of six 4K cameras, with an NVIDIA Jetson TX2  as the processor for the autonomous system, Skydio 2 is capable of flying for up to 23 minutes at a time and can be piloted by either an experienced pilot or by the AI-based system. 

The Jetson TX2 has 256 GPU cores and is capable of 1.3 trillion operations a second. According to the team, the drone uses nine custom deep neural networks that help the drone track up to 10 objects while traveling at speeds of 36 miles per hour. 

“Skydio 2 enables you to capture everything from a backyard pickup game to a downhill adventure with a single tap, the company wrote in blog post. “It builds on Skydio R1’s foundation and takes it to the next level.”

A new algorithm focused on cinematic capture is capable of updating a 3D point cloud a million points per second. 

The drone can be controlled by either an iOS or Android app or with a beacon or a controller. 

Skydio was founded in 2014, and in 2018 the company launched R1. Skydio 2 is the result of over 10 years of research and development by drone, Ai and computer vision experts, the company says.

“Its design is informed by everything we learned developing, shipping, and servicing R1, and all the feedback we’ve gotten from our first customers,” the company said. “Our goal as a company is very simple: make drones useful for people by making them smart.”

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NVIDIA’s Inception program is a virtual accelerator program that helps startups during critical stages of product development, prototyping and deployment. Every Inception member gets a custom set of ongoing benefits, such as NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI) credits, marketing support and hardware technology discounts, that provide early-stage startups with fundamental tools to help them grow.

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