When: 3rd of December, 11:00am AEDT
Where: This seminar will be partially presented at the ACFR seminar area, J04 lvl 2 (Rose St Building) and partially online via Zoom. RSVP
Speaker: Dr Suchet Bargoti
Title: Drones as Infrastructure
Abstract:
Drones are maturing into infrastructure: persistent, networked sensor–actuator platforms that deliver repeatable, auditable data streams for emergency response and industrial inspection and mapping. Skydio’s autonomy-first strategy treats the vehicle as an intelligent, reliable node in that infrastructure, combining high-fidelity onboard perception, robust state estimation, and real-time planning and control to enable safe, repeatable operation close to complex structures and in GPS-challenged environments.
Such autonomous systems unlock significant value for public safety, defense, and critical-infrastructure industries by enabling rapid situational awareness, persistent monitoring, and low-risk access to hazardous or constrained environments. In public safety they accelerate emergency response, search-and-rescue and incident mapping with reliable, repeatable data; in defense they support resilient situational awareness; for infrastructure owners they enable routine, high-precision inspections, early anomaly detection, and asset lifecycle management at scale. The talk focuses on how the autonomy stack, onboard perception, precision localization, real-time planning and control, and cloud integration, enables these capabilities and presents practical examples and applications that illustrate the transition from prototypes to operational systems.
Bio:
Suchet Bargoti is Director of Inspection and Mapping at Skydio. He works at the intersection of field robotics and perception, developing autonomous systems that enable machines to sense their environments and make data-driven decisions at scale. He earned a Ph.D. in perception for agricultural robotics from ACFR in 2017. Before joining Skydio he led technical strategy for inspections at scale at Abyss Solutions. At Skydio he leads efforts to make drones dependable systems for inspecting critical infrastructure.