Skydio Cloud, Controller, Ecosystem

Designed web app, controller, and ecosystem products. Came up with a new product category of use cases with public safety agencies (DFR command), live streaming across the apps (ReadyLink), partnership integrations (Skydio Extend), and sensor fusion AI (Skydio Connect Fusion) on the controller.

Jan – Sept 2024

These designs span across the Skydio web app, mobile web, and controller. All were designed 0-1, in partnership with customers and prospects who were interested in digital transformation but looking for a compelling vision. We created this with them. And last year, 275 public safety agencies selected Skydio for DFR.

Drone as first responder for public safety agencies

Worked with a small team to develop a completely new interface for first response. It supports both single-drone and multi-drone operations, giving operators full control across different mission types. When paired with Skydio X10 and Remote Ops software, users can fly drones from virtually anywhere, anytime, with awareness of range limitations.

My design highlights

Environmental safety check status to ensure your operators know whether it’s safe to fly with a suite of safety information so they can make more informed decisions about whether and where to take off.

Alerting system for maintaining airspace awareness for your remote operators in command with ADS-B sensing and integrations with Dedrone and other radar providers.

Integrated systems & cards that direct drones to any custom waypoint or Axon body worn camera with map markers, including the live stream of other body cameras and devices.

Live stream links monitoring system for sharing live camera position and the live stream with any other responding officers. Designed the sharing system & multi-player interface across web, controller, and mobile.

The transparency dashboard for public and stakeholder visibility, showing when and where flights are occurring, along with the flight purpose for peace of mind from public communities.

Reporting dashboard of program metrics to command staff, local jurisdiction leadership and decision-makers to help with accountability and funding questions. This interface was designed on on Esri, a partner app integrating flight data from Skydio.

ReadyLink for public safety agencies

I designed the ReadyLink experience. This became Skydio’s live streaming product, acting as both a monitoring system for sharing live camera position, and sharing live stream with any other responding officers. You can generate a ReadyLink in Skydio Cloud to quickly and easily share access to the live stream of one or all drones in the workspace. The idea was first conceived observing pilots testing our first batch of X10 drones, and shipped within weeks.

Design highlights

Open the live stream via QR code on mobile web, and see what the drone is seeing, identify where it is on the map, and support other officers getting en route to the scene to respond quickly. All this needs to happen within seconds during high stakes incident response.

Readylink on the web app and controls also comes with situational awareness layer that overlays drone locations, live feeds, and mission context on a map-based interface

ReadyLink on the controller allows officers on the ground to share a live stream for others to view on their phone and follow along.

You can create parent links with a series of scheduled live streams from your desktop app, or forward single links from any mobile device or controller with an active live stream.

Live streams should not get into the wrong hands, like a shooting incident being broadcasted by the media… so we also build a permissioning system of allowed and disallowed links based on the drone type and pilot.

This original storyboard was demoed for the entire company at our January event. I put together mocks to illustrate the end-to-end story of how drone as first responder comes together. From police leadership actively monitoring the scene, to responding officers on the ground, and the various ways links can be shared (sensitive of permissions) in between.

Dock for X10 Monitoring System

This is a monitoring dashboard for Docks for X10. Drones are housed within docks that sit on top of buildings, in warehouses, or outdoors in a variety of weather conditions. We needed to remotely monitor how the devices were doing, hardware conditions, intelligence to identify when parts need replacement, and methods to assess quality and connectivity between the dock and drone connection points.

Design highlights

I designed a dashboard to view all docks in inventory, conditions of parts, by evaluating all datasets available from the system that could be reasonably communicated to the user.

This comes with an entirely new equipment page for assessing status of all parts, attachments, sensors, each coming with their own data visualization, overview, and scheduled maintenance ticketing system.

Learn more about the new dock here.

Skydio Connect (Sensor Fusion)

Skydio Connect is a resilient connectivity suite that keeps your mission on track without disruption. Connectivity may fail when the drone is in urban canyons, rural settings, contested environments, signal shadows. This is when the system can intelligently switch to fallbacks, ask the user to switch, and visually display the connectivity map of the environment for transparency.

I designed notifications, adaptive interfaces, visual display & human-AI inputs at different types of connectivity success & failure points.

For contested environments: Secure multiband communication seamlessly switches between bands to avoid jamming and ensure robust performance in high-stakes missions. Learn more

Came up with Skydio Connect Fusion as a paradigm for continuously monitoring your connection options by weaving together the strongest signal. Worked with systems & connectivity engineers to envision how this integrated with the user experience of the controller & remote flight with web app.

Connect 5G keeps you flying through signal shadows and beyond range limits.

Connect SL provides a strong, stable point-to-point connection.

Skydio Extend

I designed & productized features leveraging integrations, by identifying the software capabilities of our partnerships & potential connection points with Skydio. This resulted in features such as media capture and syncing, path planning, and integration data alerts.

See the integration catalog.

Easily capture repetitive data sets over time with advanced mission planning and scheduling tools. Skydio’s Visual Positioning System maps environments in real-time for precise data capture, mission after mission, indoors or out.

Gather data in real-time for quick decision-making and easily access your history of data to analyze long-term trends.

Remote Ops integrates with common streaming platforms to send video to wherever people are watching.

Launch flights automatically with built-in alerts that detect incidents and issues the drone can respond to, triggered by on-device AI mixing location data, battery life, and more.