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A comment on US Army will buy enhanced variant of the Skydio X2 drone. Parent comment

Re:US Army will buy enhanced variant of the Skydio X2 drone by nathancahill on Monday December 18, 2023 @05:25AM (#38680908)
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.

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Re:US Army will buy enhanced variant of the Skydio X2 drone by justinclift on Monday December 18, 2023 @06:10AM (#38681155)
How does it not keep up with a mountain bike, but it can keep up with a car???
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Re:US Army will buy enhanced variant of the Skydio X2 drone by nathancahill on Monday December 18, 2023 @03:02PM (#38687428)
Offroading (truly offroading, not just driving on a dirt road) is considerably slower than mountain biking.
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Re:US Army will buy enhanced variant of the Skydio X2 drone by matthew-wegner on Monday December 18, 2023 @10:44AM (#38684000)
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 :(

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Re:US Army will buy enhanced variant of the Skydio X2 drone by nathancahill on Monday December 18, 2023 @03:07PM (#38687489)
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.

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Re:US Army will buy enhanced variant of the Skydio X2 drone by matthew-wegner on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @09:22AM (#38695813)
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!

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