US Army will buy enhanced variant of the Skydio X2 drone
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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!
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...
Now I use it for offroading (the follow car mode works even better than follow person), rock climbing and trail running.
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 :(
Crazy it's up to $5k. I think I picked up mine for $1500? Something like that.
And yeah, that's at South Mountain in Phoenix!
Was it expensive as crap? Absolutely! Can I hand my kids my phone and let them fly the drone and it not end up in a lake? Yep, that too.
Peace of mind has its costs
At ~800g AUW, sub-250g requirements just put the nail in the coffin - the avoidance tech doesn't scale down - a 2kg drone need the extra same weight in sensors and compute and battery to power that extra compute as a 249g one.
There isn’t even a medical requirement!
There is a country what happily used DJI drones to harass their own people for years, and now happily use them to kill them and not only them.
Even the EU is at best a loose (and obviously voluntary/ephemeral what with the UK) collection of generally aligned states.
Same thing is happening with high quality cameras, Im sure GoPro is not happy, and neither is Blackmagic.
It seemed more like a ‘eh good enough’ guess based on the amount of damage someone could actually do while staying under half a pound. (If crashed into someone/ingested into an engine, ran into a car on the highway, etc.).
Similar to DMV licensing cutoffs. A lot easier to get a license to drive a scooter than a school bus or hazmat tanker.
Western militaries are still in the outdated mindset of treating drones as assets instead of consumables. Germany keeps sending >$xxxK observation platforms to Ukraine despite contacts communicating back survivability rates. That one fixed wing drone cost more than 20 Mavics or 50 domestic drones, and isnt better in any way.