Even though it was January here in Colorado, we had a warm day that allowed Randy and I to get up into the mountains for a test ride with the SkyDio Beacon. I don’t want to spoil the results, but we were absolutely amazed!!!

The Beacon controller is the only reason I got a SkyDio drone. It works with GPS, so even when the drone can’t see you, it still knows where you are and can follow. This is the only way I could get reliable drone footage while riding my motorcycle (and without having a production assistant riding on the back).

In my previous post on the initial test flight of my new SkyDio drone, I used the app to control the drone. In this video I used the Beacon controller.

From SkyDio:

The Skydio Beacon unlocks a new level of robustness by extending communication range and providing accurate user  positioning while also enabling lightweight controllability

When tracking a subject the Skydio 2 relies on Visual recognition of a subject to follow. However there may be cases, such as going through dense trees, where the subject is not completely visible. In cases such as these, Skydio 2 will rely on GPS tracking to maintain subject lock.

At the heart of Skydio 2 is the NVIDIA Tegra TX2, the fastest, most power-efficient embedded AI computing device available. With 256 GPU cores capable of 1.3 trillion operations a second, Skydio 2 is the flying supercomputer.