I wish they did consumer drones, period! They left the market!

Innovators Dilemna movement; why chase a competitive cut-throat consumer market when there's big cushy expensive whales of governments, a much bigger revenue stream.

Especially since drones have quickly become the leading "attritable" piece of equipment. Where-as a consumer will hold on to a drone for years!

I think/hope the consumer market for drones is larger than the military market.

Just yesterday I read an article about how the rebels in Myanmar were using consumer drones and quadcopters very effectively to take control of military outposts from the junta there with minimal casualties on either side. The defenders were locked down taking shelter for over four days while the rebels flew drones in to recon the area and drop explosives until there were just two buildings and a temple left, at which point the defenders surrendered.

The article speculates that the rebels were supplied with the drones through foreign military powers. I’ll see if I can find it.

Here it is: https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/soldiers-surrender-bases-fall...

Non-paywall version: https://archive.is/n9e6J

Thanks, I read it on the Apple News app and didn't realize it was paywalled.

The amount one is willing to pay for a drone vs the govt doing so is not the same.

They made nice demos, DJI makes drones that actually do all those things.

Skydio 2's autonomy is still miles ahead of DJI's current generation. Have you used one in person?

I have one and fly it regularly. Sadly it's top speed isn't fast enough for most of the things I'd like to film in follow mode like mountain biking, backcountry skiing. Their initial demo videos showed a lot of mountain biking but it just isn't fast enough in practice.

Now I use it for offroading (the follow car mode works even better than follow person), rock climbing and trail running.

How does it not keep up with a mountain bike, but it can keep up with a car???

Offroading (truly offroading, not just driving on a dirt road) is considerably slower than mountain biking.

Yeah, a faster top speed would be nice for sure! I mostly do mountain unicycling, which stays in the sweet spot easily (unicycling is pretty slow compared to i.e. biking).

The desert isn't a very challenging environment for obstacles, even still, this front-follow would be very hard to achieve with piloted FPV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koWzoCUUIbE

Alas, there will never be a consumer Skydio 3, and the Skydio 2 is now $5k via their enterprise pricing :(

Nice video. Looks like Arizona. Used to live there for mountain biking.

Crazy it's up to $5k. I think I picked up mine for $1500? Something like that.

They exited the consumer market completely. They're still selling Skydio 2 hardware, but now via an enterprise package/pricing. It's a huge bummer: https://www.skydio.com/blog/skydio-to-sunset-consumer-drone-...

And yeah, that's at South Mountain in Phoenix!

DJI makes drones that crash, or they did and I became an expert at repairing phantoms. I have still yet to crash my Skydio2

Was it expensive as crap? Absolutely! Can I hand my kids my phone and let them fly the drone and it not end up in a lake? Yep, that too.

Peace of mind has its costs

DJI cannot compare with Skydio’s follow software. It’s pretty magical.

DJI ate them for breakfast, turns out a single better implemented feature doesn't make a competitive product (or even a survivable niche, apparently).

At ~800g AUW, sub-250g requirements just put the nail in the coffin - the avoidance tech doesn't scale down - a 2kg drone need the extra same weight in sensors and compute and battery to power that extra compute as a 249g one.

Part 107 isn't really out of reach for most people.

Part 107 is in reach for anyone with even moderate motivation, the ability to graduate highschool, and a somewhat clean record.

There isn’t even a medical requirement!

The U.S. and Europe really shouldn't allow DJI sales: DJI is in effect part of the PLA, and they're amortizing military research across worldwide sales.

Maybe you intend this, but that argument could be applied to many other product segments.

> Europe

There is a country what happily used DJI drones to harass their own people for years, and now happily use them to kill them and not only them.

Examples?

Since when is Europe a country?

Even the EU is at best a loose (and obviously voluntary/ephemeral what with the UK) collection of generally aligned states.

I would readily agree with you (part of PLA, recruiting brightest minds with RoboMasters competition to build future AI driven drone swarms), except for the fact DJI sells top quality products at bottom dollar prices. If anything DJI is flooding the market with product so good and cheap it destroys any potential margins for western suppliers, forcing companies like Skydio into expensive niches.

Same thing is happening with high quality cameras, Im sure GoPro is not happy, and neither is Blackmagic.

the FAA reversed engineered the 250g limit specifically to make the cutoff not include these features.

Cite?

It seemed more like a ‘eh good enough’ guess based on the amount of damage someone could actually do while staying under half a pound. (If crashed into someone/ingested into an engine, ran into a car on the highway, etc.).

Similar to DMV licensing cutoffs. A lot easier to get a license to drive a scooter than a school bus or hazmat tanker.