Skydio 2+

The Skydio 2+ is a small autonomous quadcopter introduced in 2021 by Skydio , the Redwood City company that built its reputation on obstacle-avoiding consumer and prosumer drones before pivoting toward defence and public-safety customers. It arrived as a refresh of the original Skydio 2, extending flight time to roughly 27 minutes and pushing controller range to about 6 km with the included Beacon and Controller hardware. While later overshadowed in Skydio’s lineup by the enterprise-focused X2 and the military X10D, the 2+ is the platform that put the company’s autonomy stack into the hands of a wide audience and seeded much of its government adoption.

The defining subsystem is the navigation suite: six 4K colour cameras arranged for full spherical coverage, feeding an onboard NVIDIA Jetson processor that builds a real-time 3D map of the surroundings. The aircraft plans its own path through that map, allowing pilots to designate a subject — a person, a vehicle, a structure — and let the drone follow, orbit, or scout ahead while flying through trees, around buildings, and under obstacles without manual stick input. A 12-megapixel gimbal-stabilised camera handles the actual imagery, with HDR video and a payload bay on the top deck for accessories such as Skydio’s own Beacon GPS tracker. The autonomy software, branded Skydio Autonomy, is the same lineage that the company markets to enterprise and defence buyers; the 2+ effectively served as its mass-market shop window.

Operators are concentrated in the United States. The 2+ saw adoption across US police departments, fire services, and search-and-rescue teams, and the Department of Defense placed it on its Blue UAS list of vetted small drones, opening a path into Army, Air Force, and other federal use. It is not a combat system and has no battlefield record, but the Blue UAS designation and its NDAA-compliant supply chain made it one of the few non-Chinese small quadcopters US public agencies could field without waiver. Skydio reported tens of thousands of units sold across consumer and government channels before the platform was retired.

In August 2023 Skydio announced it would stop manufacturing consumer drones, ending new 2+ production to concentrate on enterprise and defence hardware. The 2+ remains in active service with existing customers and is still supported, but its role in the catalogue has been taken over by the X10 and X10D, which carry the same autonomy approach into a larger, ruggedised airframe aimed squarely at military reconnaissance.