The Skydio 2 flying drone is back on sale, with a fix we were waiting for

The $ 999 Skydio 2 auto-flying drone is one of the most incredible gadgets I have ever touched, but it has its fair share of limits. Two of them: it was practically impossible to buy, and we found the drone to be nearly shock-resistant could crash during certain landings.

But at least these two specific problemsmay soon disappear. Today Skydio says it is back on sale, dramatically increasing its production capacity, and the company has just released a huge software update that could make it easier for your drone to land.

You can consult the from Skydio publish and changelog for main details, but the most eye-catching feature is this: the carrying case supplied with your drone now doubles as a self-contained landing strip.

The CEO of Skydio, Adam Bry, tells me that landing has been a tricky problem for an autonomous drone because most people expect them to descend directly to Earth. "If the drone starts to get too creative, people end up worrying, he said, but in our tests we found that making vertically predictable landings left the Skydio 2 with a weakness: it wouldn't necessarily avoid obstacles after you told him to land, and he might even crash if you weren't careful where you got him'have settled. down.

Now, each Skydio 2 comes with a dedicated landing strip, obstacle avoidance remains activated until there are three of you. meters from the ground, and there is additional built-in security: you can "Push the drone left, right, forward or backward if you see that, despite its best efforts, it could still prick something when descending. Bry says the drone will lock onto its carrying case within a radius of about 6 feet, so you don't need to be exactly on it to land safely.

In addition, Skydio now trusts your phone's GPS sensors and the optional beacon to let it move away from you more than before - double it distance to 20 meters with a telephone and quadruple to 40 meters with the beacon - to film a large landscape while the drone automatically follows you. You cannot always pgot closer shots than before, because Bry says the company wants to maintain a minimum distance for safety, but "we feel comfortable composing the lineup. "

COVID forced Skydio to stop production, but no other work.

Skydio has not had a particularly easy period with the COVID-19 pandemic, because orders for shelters on site forced him to close his small assembly line in Mountain View, California, to the point that he has been unable to fill all of his existing pre-orders and has not taken any new ones since March. But Bry says his startup didn't have to fire anyone, just putting their manufacturing staff on a part-time basis while they weather the storm. "All of this software update was done by people working from home, collaborating with the test team, and then coming outant and flying in vacant space when they could, says Bry. However, he does not see his startup giving up its expensive office space in Silicon Valley in the long term.

Fortunately, Skydio doesn't just rely on drone sales to stay afloat: it also has corporate partnerships for first responders, inspection inspections infrastructure, etc. Bry says the company also donated 50 drones to public safety agencies during the pandemic via its emergency response program .

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The company is operating a new plant elsewhere in the United States this summer, and expects to have two to five times production capacity when all is said and done. Bry says Skydio hopes to be caught up with all of the current preorders by the end of September, and you should be able to buy them right away in October if all goes well.

Besides, it will not be the only update of the Skydio 2 functionalities, because the team thinks that there is more to do with the 's autonomy, video capture, and functionality of the application. Bry says it would be cool if the Skydio 2 could deliver footage from more than one of its seven cameras at a time. And "of course," he says, Skydio is already working on next-generation hardware, although he's not talking about it yet.