(upbeat music)
- In this day and age,
people are pretty familiar with the idea
of a consumer drone.
But even today the general concept of a drone
remains pretty much the same.
You need a wide open space and you need a remote control
to fly your drone in.
And you're probably gonna need some pilot experience
to make sure you don't hurt anybody,
and wreck your device in the process.
That is not the case with the Skydio R1.
Instead the device uses an array of cameras, sensors,
and a powerful onboard computer to map its surroundings,
predict where it's going next,
and avoid people and inanimate objects.
Essentially this drone flies itself,
all of the time.
The company thinks this is going to be
an action sport enthusiast's dream come true.
Of course, hearing those claims,
we felt like we had to put it through its paces.
So we brought the R1 to a park just outside of San Francisco
so we could test its abilities
in three different situations.
Hiking, skateboarding, and biking.
We wanted to see how well the R1
could avoid obstacles like trees,
whether it could keep up and film stable 4K at high speeds,
and how well it adapts to changes in its environment.
So the Skydio R1 is pretty simple.
Basically all you gonna need is the drone itself
and a flat surface to let it take off from,
and a battery, which plugs in right here.
After that everything is taken care of on the mobile app.
(upbeat music)
What's surprising about the R1 is how fluid it feels.
It's not stopping and starting and trying to calibrate
or locate you.
It basically has a image of you all the time,
it's tracking you all throughout the environment
with all of its cameras and sensors.
And then it's just following you in a very fluid,
almost natural way.
Skydio says that's because the drone is predicting
where it's gonna go all of the time.
Now it's time to try a second activity, biking.
(blades whirring)
As you can see here, once it takes off,
all you need to do is tap on the image of your face
from the live camera feed,
and the drone snaps into position and then it follows you
wherever you go.
It's important to note that the camera sensor on the R1
isn't the absolute best.
The drone's camera lacks dynamic range,
and you can't set up color profiles,
which would help in post processing.
And despite being 4K,
the overall quality isn't as good
as what you'd get on the DJI.
With some graininess and noise that you might not be able
to catch with the video previews on the mobile app,
but you can definitely see when you blow it up
full screen on your computer.
(upbeat music)
So biking with the Skydio R1 went well
but that was basically one static camera angle.
So we're here at a skate park in Balboa in San Francisco,
to see if the R1 can keep up
with lots of changing camera angles.
Luckily, the company has built in
a number of different shooting modes,
so that the Skydio R1 can keep up with you,
from either following you from the front,
following you from the side,
it can even orbit in one giant 360.
Let's give it a shot.
Here it seems to be struggling a little bit
with the speed going around the skate park
and because it's such a tight area,
but it hasn't hit anything and it pretty much
recalibrates itself very quickly.
Oh wait, I think it was following you.
So we ran into a couple issues of the R1 here
at the skate park.
For one it started following Vjeran instead of following me.
So because the R1 basically tracks you,
the shape of your body and as you go around
in an environment,
it can get a little bit mixed up,
if it sees somebody else that looks similar to you,
and then it'll start following that person instead.
The whole point of the R1 is that anyone can use it.
I'm not an experienced pilot myself,
I've only barely flown drones from say DJI,
but I was able to use the R1 right out of the box.
There are a few compromises with the R1.
It's an action sports drone but it's not waterproof,
so it'd be really risky to take it skiing,
and it'd be even riskier to take it surfing.
It also doesn't have a micro SD card slot
like some other drones from DJI.
But it does have 64 gigabytes of onboard storage.
That's probably more than enough for the 16-minute
battery life you get on a single charge.
So if you're a photographer or a videographer
and you really want cool aerial shots,
or say you just like piloting drones
because it's really fun,
the R1 is probably not for you.
And also it's $2,500, that's a lot of money for a drone
and it's also being hand-assembled
in Mountain View, California,
where the company's headquarters are.
That means it's basically
only for the early adopters right now.
That said, drones as smart as these,
they're gonna get better, they're gonna get cheaper,
and they're gonna get even smarter down the line.
And Skydio has proven that it's at the front of the pack.
Ooh!
Oh my god, my chain broke!
(laughs)
Well, my chain just fell off,
but the drone's fine.