Skydio makes its Symforce framework open-source

US-based drone maker Skydio developed SymForce, a framework for writing algorithms for drones and other robots. The company announced that it will release SymForce as an open-source project to help accelerate innovation across robotics.

Skydio says it has learned a lot during the development of the Skydio R1 and Skydio 2 drones. About five years ago, the drone maker started developing a new motion planner to balance dynamic flight, obstacle avoidance, and cinematography objectives for the Skydio 2 in real-time.

With SymForce, Skydio has developed a far more powerful motion planner that is easier to maintain and runs at a faster pace on its drones.

“It’s an incredible tool that allows our team to quickly progress from rapid prototyping to the type of highly-optimized runtime code that powers our drones,” Skydio says in a press release. “SymForce is the result of five years of development by Skydio’s autonomy team in an environment where performance and code maintainability are crucial. We think the challenges it solves are common and that SymForce can help robotics engineers build faster, the same way that PyTorch and TensorFlow accelerated the deep learning ecosystem.”

Skydio makes SymForce available to the world

It is exciting to see, Skydio sharing SymForce with the world as it speeds up the development of drones and robots by students or other tech companies.

The drone maker says that Sim force is already powering tens of thousands of robots at their offices. The public library, however, is new and is currently being released in beta stage.

“This is just the beginning, and we are excited for engagement from the community, Skydio says. “If you are interested in joining our world-class Skydio team, contributing to SymForce is a fantastic way to meet us!”

Code: https://github.com/symforce-org/symforce

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.07889

Docs: https://symforce.org/

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