Robotics Seminar: Adam Bry

In this talk I will discuss some of the core autonomy technologies that power the >40k flying robots Skydio has shipped to >2k organizations across >20 different industries from energy to transportation to construction. I will also share our learnings and perspective on serving law enforcement and defense, where the positive impact can be incredible, but there are serious ethical considerations.

Adam Bry is co-founder and CEO at Skydio, the largest US drone manufacturer, and the world leader in autonomous flight. He has two decades of experience with small UAS, starting as a national champion R/C airplane aerobatics pilot. As a grad student in Aero/Astro & CSAIL at MIT, he did award winning research that pioneered autonomous flight for drones. After graduating from MIT, Adam co-founded Google[x]’s Project Wing. He has co-authored numerous technical papers and patents, and was also recognized on MIT’s TR35 list for young innovators. In 2021, Adam was appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Transportation to the FAA’s Advanced Aviation Advisory Committee. Founded in 2014, Skydio is made up of leading experts in AI, robotics, cameras, and electric vehicles. Skydio is trusted by enterprises across public safety, critical infrastructure, and defense and is backed by top investors and strategic partners including Andreesen Horowitz, Levitate Capital, Next47, IVP, Playground, Axon, and NVIDIA.

This semester, MIT Robotics Seminars are sponsored by: Skydio, Project Aria, Symbotic, and Amazon. Skydio (https://www.skydio.com/) is a leader in vision-based autonomous navigation (and more!) for drones. Symbotic (https://www.symbotic.com/) is redesigning the future of warehouse automation with mobile robots (just a few miles from MIT!). Meta's Project Aria is innovating on many fronts (https://www.projectaria.com/), from egocentric machine perception to contextual AI and applications. Amazon (https://www.amazon.science/research-areas/robotics) is building new kinds of GenAI for robotics as they grow towards 1M deployed warehouse robots. MIT Robotics Seminars are supported by LIDS and CSAIL.