Skydio, the leading US drone manufacturer and world leader in autonomous flight technology, has announced it is now shipping Skydio X2 drones with dual color/thermal sensors to defense, public sector and enterprise customers. A new X2 configuration with a single wide-angle color camera for close up inspections is now available for pre-order. In addition, the company also launched Skydio Cloud, a suite of advanced cloud services and robust APIs that unlock the power of drones for use at scale.
“Since our effort’s founding in 2014, drones have become an important part of our operations, and being able to leverage Skydio’s autonomous flight capabilities is a key part of safe deployment. Skydio X2’s combination of autonomy with dual color/thermal sensor, longer flight time and extended wireless range will help us conduct aerial inspections more efficiently and with greater detail than ever before,” said Todd Graetz, Director, RPA/UAS, BNSF Railway. “Furthermore, we have been testing Skydio Cloud as part of the early access program and we are excited by the prospect of managing our vehicles, closely tracking our usage metrics and operating our distributed fleet.”
Skydio X2 is available in two versions: X2D for defense and federal agencies, and X2E for enterprises, first responders, and civilian agencies. Both X2D and X2E support the following configurations:
- Color/Thermal dual sensor (shipping now): Features a 4K60 HDR color camera with 16x digital zoom and a narrow-angle lens (~46° HFOV) optimized for long range situational awareness, and FLIR® Boson 320×256 LWIR thermal sensor with 8x digital zoom.
- Color (available for pre-order): Features a 4K60 HDR resolution color camera with 16x digital zoom and wide-angle focus (~80° HFOV) optimized for close-up inspections of infrastructure assets, scene reconstruction, and small area mapping. Ideal for autonomous inspections with Skydio 3D Scan.
In addition, Skydio X2 was selected by the U.S. Army for final integration in the Short Range Reconnaissance (SRR) program of record.
Along with X2, Skydio has also begun shipping the new Skydio Enterprise Controller and Skydio Autonomy Enterprise Foundation for X2.
“Skydio Cloud unlocks the power of drones for organizational use at scale. It provides a foundation for connected flight operations, providing tight integration between hardware and cloud-based software, and unlocks a broad ecosystem of new partner solutions via an open API,” said Mike Ross, Senior Director of Product Management at Skydio. “Bridging the drone industry’s hardware-software gap, our flight operations will be truly connected to a platform that will enable users to quickly collect the data they need, to effectively search through it, and to easily share it throughout their organization.”
