In 2018 Skydio, a startup founded by three MIT alumni, released the R1, a drone that flew, tracked a subject, and avoided obstacles entirely on its own, with no human piloting it. The company, founded in 2014 by Adam Bry, Abraham Bachrach, and Matt Donahoe, called the R1 a self-flying camera. It launched to consumers in March 2018 at around 2,500 dollars.
The R1’s autonomy came from a tight loop of perception, planning, and control running on the drone itself. An array of onboard cameras built a real-time 3D understanding of the surroundings, deep neural networks identified and tracked the person it was filming, and a motion planner predicted where that person would move so the drone could follow while keeping clear of trees, walls, and other obstacles. The CEO argued that no other system at the time had a comparable full, end-to-end autonomous software stack.
This was a notable step beyond the GPS-following and basic obstacle sensors of earlier consumer drones; the R1 demonstrated a level of real-world visual autonomy closer to research robotics than to typical hobby aircraft. Skydio later pivoted toward enterprise, public-safety, and defense markets.
For a general reader, the R1 showed that hard robotics problems, seeing the world and reacting in real time at speed, could be packaged into a shipping consumer product, foreshadowing the autonomous drones that would later beat human racing champions.