I am very pleased to announce the general availability of Skydio Cloud, a suite of advanced cloud services and robust APIs that unlock the power of drones for use at scale. Back in May, we announced limited early access for two of these services, Skydio Fleet Manager and Skydio Media Sync, both of which are now available to our customers. Skydio Streaming and Skydio Remote Ops are still in development and will be available soon.
The current complexity of operating a fleet of manual drones goes beyond the lack of intelligent in-flight autonomy. Drone fleet and data management software programs are hard to use. From having to manually set up and upload flight logs from each individual drone to cumbersome user interfaces, the current solutions on the market are slow and antiquated. On top of that, maintaining all the data that the drones are producing such as flight logs, location information, and media can get messy and make it difficult to locate information quickly. The need for a fully integrated solution that flawlessly syncs and organizes all this information is vital to the success of enterprise drone operations.
Seamless integration with powerful cloud services is critical to managing enterprise drone programs at scale, enabling program managers to monitor their fleet, to maintain accurate records of every mission, to access and analyze data, and to share that data across the organization to make effective use of it. This is the mission of Skydio Cloud.
Skydio Cloud runs on AWS - US Region cloud infrastructure, which ensures that the data sent to the cloud never leaves the US. Skydio Cloud works out-of-the-box with Skydio 2 now (with support for Skydio X2E coming soon) and includes the following services:
Skydio Fleet Manager
Skydio Fleet Manager allows organizations to automatically upload flight telemetry directly from the Skydio Enterprise App from a mobile device or from the Skydio Enterprise Controller. Fleet Manager enables program managers to quickly search for flights across their organization, with the ability to view and replay the flight path and telemetry for any flight. Reporting includes a summary report providing usage metrics across an organization, along with detailed activity reports providing metrics for individual pilots and vehicles. For program accountability reporting, a flexible flights report makes it easy to quickly filter by date, pilot and vehicle and then to quickly export the necessary data to satisfy external reporting requirements.
Skydio Media Sync
Skydio Media Sync extends this functionality by enabling organizations to automatically upload media directly from Skydio vehicles via WiFi, eliminating the need to manually manage SD cards, and making it easy to organize, store, search and share media across an organization. With Media Sync, we’re making it incredibly simple to ensure that all of the data from distributed field operations makes it back to the office where it can be leveraged across an organization, completely eliminating the need for manual file management.
With the introduction of Skydio 3D Scan, Skydio Media Sync also includes the ability to upload and view 3D Scan datasets from the cloud.
Finally, modern REST-based APIs ensure that all of this data is also accessible by developers for integration with an organization’s existing business tools. Interactive documentation makes it easy for developers to start building quickly.
As I previously mentioned, we have been working closely with some of our customers for some time now as part of the early access program, and we are very encouraged by the value that these organizations are finding in their experience with Skydio Cloud.
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
Todd Graetz
Director, RPA/UAS, BNSF Railway
The public release of Skydio Cloud represents a huge milestone for all of us at Skydio, as we become the first US drone manufacturer to provide an end-to-end solution that seamlessly integrates our industry leading autonomous drones with a secure, enterprise-grade cloud platform to manage fleets and data at scale. If you want to start connecting your Skydio fleet to Skydio Cloud, please contact us here.
