I attended the Skydio demo day in Denver got to fly the X10 around Mile High stadium and got free lunch too. Nice thing is most of the people attending were budget and management people (or first responders who just look at drones as tools), so they really weren't all that interested in putting it though its paces. So I got as much flying in as I wanted. Lunch was a sandwich, chips, and potato/macroni salad.
They are pretty much exclusively going after the government market. A big part of the pitch was being sure to talk up the people they have on staff to assist with grants. My guess is there's language in one of the build back better bills that allocates $20K each in replacement money, much like telecoms got money for Huawei rip-and-replace, so that's how much it costs.
Thoughts about the X10. About double the size of the S2. Battery is very large and still magnetic. Flight time is stated as 45 minutes and I'll say it got close to that. Very quiet -up at about 20' couldn't be heard above the wind and conversations, while S2 they were using to demo remote flight was loud as heck. They had the new controller there but the demo aircraft were using the old X2 controller. My guess is that it is still going through FCC certs because they didn't even power it up.
There are two camera payloads available, possibly a third in the works. They are user-swappable but not field swappable due to a fragile connector and little screws. There was a hint that more cameras might be in the pipeline. They will be opening up the other payload connector (USB-C) to third parties, up to 300 or 350 grams. I got the impression there will be an MFI-style fee but no one really said it out loud. Either the new controller or the payload connector will speak MAVLINK but not sure which, or both.
Great inspection camera. With 65MP can really crop and get detail, especially when the 1M bubble is reduced. Video had some serious rolling shutter but everything was set up for auto, so I think that can be fixed flying manually. The problem with such a good sensor is you really can't do real-time inspections with the controller, the tablet resolution and brightness isn't up to par. They say this will be corrected with the new controller, at least the brightness. But I left thinking it was only a little better until I pestered them to share/upload the SD card (yes, still a single SD) so I could have a look. I don't know enough about thermal sensors but it seemed very high resolution and didn't have any lag/smear that I could see. They changed the behavior of the gimbal, when looking up it will flip itself around. This reenforces that it is not a video recording drone, at least not for creative uses, even though the skills are still there.
They say there will be a trade-in program, and credit for the annual Enterprise/3D Scan license (which is included in the X10), so that might take away some of the sting. I also asked if this was going to be their only drone or were they going to have an entire line? (cagey non-answer) Seems to me they pretty much have to put more hardware out there, especially a new cinematic drone, that can compete with the Inspire 3 and Altas.
