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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine works at Skydio, which is an autonomous drone company. You give the higher-level instruction like where you want the drone to go to, or get it to follow you, etc and the AI navigation system figures out how to get there while avoiding obstacles and keeping the subject focused in the camera: https://www.skydio.com/

Following an ATV through a forest: https://youtu.be/mXeUHD-eVMs?t=329

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I've been watching Skydio for a while. They're doing amazing work. I tried to build a very simple autonomous drone in my last semester of school using a DJI Mavic Pro. Was pretty difficult, though that probably had something to do with the DJI SDK not really being setup to do what we wanted. Still, really makes me appreciate the quality of work that Skydio is doing.

They've got beastly hardware in those drones. I'm not sure if it's public info, so I won't get specific, but it's the kind of thing you'd find in high end gaming builds. It's surprising to me that they have the power budget for that given how much power it takes to fly a quadrocopter in the first place.

I was part of a student drone group last year. Previously they have been using various embedded systems like intel nuc's and nvidia tx2's. However this year they decided that it would be much better to just strap on a good old i9 instead, makes development so much easier when you don't have to spend a bunch of time optimizing stuff.

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