One Operator, Many Drones: Inside Skydio's Autonomy Stack — Suchet Bargoti, Skydio

This talk details Skydio's autonomy stack for managing a fleet of drones, emphasizing the split intelligence between edge and cloud, the use of maps as world models updated by the fleet, object tracking through occlusion, and the application of VLM agents with tool calls for tasks like "find and follow." It also discusses the limitations of end-to-end learning for physical systems requiring high reliability, contrasting it with agentic approaches for specific tasks. The core contribution is the engineering of a distributed, intelligent drone fleet system that leverages AI for complex operational tasks.