Frontiers of Autonomous Flight and Real-time 3D Reconstruction from Skydio

 

Hayk Martiros
VP of Autonomy @ Skydio
Redwood City, California, USA

 

Abstract

At Skydio, we ship autonomous robots that are flown at scale in unknown environments every day by our customers to capture incredible video, automate dangerous inspections, build digital twins, and protect the lives of soldiers and first responders. These robots operate intelligently and make decisions at high speed using their onboard cameras and algorithms.

We’ve invested a decade of R&D into handling complex visual scenarios and building a robust pipeline for visual navigation, obstacle avoidance, and rapid trajectory planning. On top of that, we’re building a rich ecosystem of real-time 3D reconstruction technology to enable 360 global localization and map building on our drones.

During the talk, I will discuss the technology and impact of our core navigation stack and 3D Scan technology, and what research frontiers lie ahead. I plan to share visual examples of the algorithms in action, and connect to how these products solve pressing global challenges and enable next-generation operations across multiple industries.

I will also introduce SymForce, our library for fast symbolic computation, code generation, and nonlinear optimization. This library powers many of our algorithms, and we have just published and open-sourced it as a contribution to the robotics community.

Biography of the speaker

Hayk Martiros is an experienced roboticist who develops robust approaches to computer vision, deep learning, nonlinear optimization, and motion planning to bring intelligent robots into the mainstream. He leads the autonomy team at Skydio, which holds the state of the art in UAV visual localization, obstacle avoidance, and navigation of complex scenarios. He also has a keen interest in systems architecture and symbolic computation. His previous works include novel hexapedal robots, collaboration between robot arms, micro-robot factories, solar panel farms, and self-balancing motorcycles. Hayk is a graduate of Stanford University and Princeton University.