I'm very much surprised to see Skydio 2 on this list.
Although it's a robot, there's not much you can do with your code right now since the Skills SDK access has been heavily restricted.
Although it's a robot, there's not much you can do with your code right now since the Skills SDK access has been heavily restricted.
Their tech blows my mind. They do all the navigation and motion planning based on just RGB cameras, running multiple neural networks in parallel on board the drone. All the depth estimation, including small obstacles likes leaves and power cables, they are doing it all onboard. I don't think anyone in industry come close to that.
I so regret missing interning with them when they were starting to grow in 2018 - they came to my University for recruiting and I was just starting my PhD and decided to not look for internships.
Check NVidia. I believe Jetson Nano can do stereo matching from multiple camera pairs in real time. From here one step to 3d points cloud. New Orin will have like 10x performance. Coming in January. So, it's within the reach. I'm thinking, have big stupid drones collecting the dust...
https://support.skydio.com/hc/en-us/articles/5338292379803-C...
My comment was about people using neural network models for everything needed to fly a drone. I've seen models fail badly in ground based robots. They are flying a drone that's running so many models to be able to track, detect, localize, plan and fly. It's insane.
Jetson Nano can do stereo matching, and perhaps one can manage to even run multiple neural networks at the same time in inference mode. Getting it into production on real world systems is a whole different story. I can't imagine how Skydio manages to produce such robust and consistent outputs. I mean it kinda makes sense why Skydio is the first and the only company so far who's able to do it effectively - Adam's (CEO) been working on it for like more than 10 years now and his PhD thesis at MIT is awesome!
The funny thing, I may try it. I'm more interested in 360 degree 3d scanner. But having that it's easy to put it on drone. I have a bunch of them, so it will be almost free.
I work on drones for research. I do RL. No one in academia can build something so robust. You seem to think that flying drones autonomously in the real world is same as running an RL simulation. Good luck trying to build it for a 1000$ lol. Sure, go ahead and try your open source project. Good luck to you!
I strongly suggest you to do some reading before talking about things you clearly don't know anything about.