스카디오 CEO 애덤 브라이, 실리콘밸리가 드론 사용을 제한해서는 안 되는 이유

출처: The Verge

오늘은 자율주행 드론을 선도하는 미국 기업 Skydio의 CEO인 아담 브라이와 대화하고 있습니다. 이 에피소드를 녹음하기 전, 실제로 아담의 노트북에서 뉴욕 스튜디오에 있는 우리 스튜디오로 베이區에 있는 Skydio 드론을 원격으로 조종하고 사무실 안을 날아다니는 실내 드론도 비행해 보았습니다. 이 영상의 전체 버전을 확인하세요.

드론을 전국적으로 비행하는 것 외에도, 아담과 저는 Skydio가 기업 시장에 집중하는 이유에 대해 이야기했습니다. 저는 경찰과 군사와 일하기에 많은 질문을 했으며, 아담은 Skydio 고객 대부분이 드론을 원격으로 중요한 인프라를 점검하는 데 사용하는 유틸리티 회사들이라는 점을 많이 언급합니다.

Verge 구독자 여러분, 어디서든 팟캐스트를 듣는다면 광고 없이 Decoder를 독점적으로 들어보실 수 있습니다. 여기로 이동해 보세요. 구독하지 않으셨다면 여기에 등록하십시오.

그것은 큰 시장이지만, 과거에는 저렴한 소비자 드론으로 서비스받던 시장이기도 했습니다. 그 제품들은 대부분 중국에서 수입된 제품이었고, 트럼프 행정부가 지난해 해외 제작 드론을 금지하면서 미국 내에 거의 사라졌습니다. 그 저렴한 DJI 드론들이 한순간 사라졌다 leaving 비싼 Skydio 제품만을 주요 대안으로 남겼습니다.

아담과 저는 또한 미국에서 복잡한 제품을 comme 드론을 제조하는 현실적인 문제와 Skydio가 군사와 협력하는 방식, 그리고 AI 활용이 방어 분야에 어떻게 맞물리는지에 대해 이야기했습니다. 특히 militari 사용의 AI는 그 어느 때보다 논쟁적입니다.

이 인터뷰에는 많은 내용이 담겨 있습니다. 무엇보다 아담이 AI를 활용해 Skydio에서 일할 수 있는 인력을 늘릴 것이라고 말한 점이 refreshing했습니다. 그리고 다시 한번 드론을 비행할 수 있어서 정말 즐거웠습니다.

자, 아담 브라이 Skydio CEO입니다. 시작하겠습니다.

이 인터뷰는 길이와 명확성을 위해 약간 편집되었습니다.

Adam Bry, you are the co- founder and CEO of Skydio. Welcome to Decoder.
I’ m very excited to be here with you.

I am super excited to talk with you. We just demoed flying an X10 drone remotely. I have a lot of follow- up questions about that. That was super interesting.

I would say the drone business itself is in a moment of extreme change. There’ s what you’ re doing with autonomy and working with governments and militaries around the world. Then, there’ s just the state of drone technology in general, which seems like it’ s on the cusp of being yet another thing. So, there’ s quite a lot to talk about.

Let’ s just start with the basics. Unless you’ re a drone nerd, you might not have heard of Skydio. Explain what Skydio is and how the company came to be.
We are the largest US drone manufacturer. We make drones that are essentially flying sensor platforms. We started in 2014, and at this point, we serve what we think of as the critical industries our civilization depends on. We work with public safety. We work with militaries. We also work with energy utilities, construction companies, departments of transportation, and security organizations.

The common thread between all of our customers is that they have hardcore, oftentimes high- risk physical operations, where putting sensors in the right place at the right time to get better information can fundamentally change outcomes. That’ s what we deliver. We deliver end‑to‑end solutions where the drone is a key piece, but the software, autonomy, integrations, and, increasingly, the end‑to‑end workflows for the different industries built around the drone’ s capabilities are really what our customers are buying.

We’ re at a super exciting moment where after years of talking about a lot of this stuff, it’ s really starting to work at scale with incredible impact.

If I think about just our drone coverage over the years, it started with those first DJI drones almost 10 or 15 years ago now. The first Phantom drones were pretty rickety. They had these giant batteries. And it was really just about flight, and being able to control flight in an easy‑to‑use way. Then we very quickly got to, “Oh boy, we could put fancy cameras in the sky,” and that was really fun. And those cameras got really fancy. Now you’ re saying it’ s a whole sensor suite, or is it just augmented cameras?

I actually think what you described there closely parallels the chapters of the drone industry that I think about. In the very early days, these electric flying machines were really toys. I think of the first chapter, and the first 10 years was about the electrification of radio‑controlled airplanes, which were recreational. It was fun to go out and fly. This is the world that I come from. I grew up flying radio‑controlled airplanes.

What I think happened is that people started bringing the toys to work and realizing that if you put the right camera on there and you had a skilled pilot flying it, you could do a lot of useful stuff. That created cool videos that showed up in cinematography, commercial real estate, things like this.

The next chapter is about autonomy, where the drone lives in a docking station, is connected to the internet, can be flown remotely and autonomously, and is a piece of infrastructure itself. I think the impact that we’ ll see from that is going to be orders of magnitude larger than everything we’ve seen thus far. And we’ ve seen a lot of good stuff thus far. I mean, a lot of great work has happened in the world of drones as tools. It’s just very small scale compared to what’s coming, and we’re really at that transition moment now.

Describe the idea that flight is the fundamental building block, that you don’ t need to think about it as much because you’re talking about the capabilities built on the second and third order of the thing able to fly itself. Do you spend time investing in how the drones fly themselves or is that solved?

We spend a ton of time investing in that. There’s kind of this trope in the drone industry where, “Oh, it’ s not about the drone. It’s about the data.” Which is sort of true. You could say the same thing about almost anything. It’s not about the phone, it’s about the apps, the software, or whatever.

But you have to earn the right to deliver these solutions. The way you earn that right is by being a world‑class designer and manufacturer of these systems and making them super capable and super reliable. I think one of the things that’s oftentimes missed with drones is the idea that they are cutting‑edge aerospace devices. They vibrate, they have aerodynamics, they have thermal concerns. We have really advanced compute running on board, a bunch of sensors. It’s akin to building a self‑driving car that flies.

If you want to be a good drone company, you need to be a world‑class aerospace engineering organization across 10 or 15 different disciplines. It’s only once you have that and are great at it that you can then start to focus on enterprise software integrations that connect your solution into, for example, 911 dispatch software that a public safety organization might be using or the incident management system for an energy utility.

Those things really matter, but if the core technology foundation isn’t great, they’re less important.

We’ re going to come back to the phrase “world‑