The Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight platform is designed for high-end commercial and consumer drones as well as other robotic applications (Photo : Youtube)
Qualcomm is ready to showcase its Snapdragon Flight processors for drones, offering lower price and improved battery life.
Ahead of CES 2016 in Las Vegas, Qualcomm has posted new video on Youtube that offers a preview of Snapdragon Flight's capabilities. The company says that its Snapdragon Flight processors will bring down the cost of drones, improve their battery life, and make advanced features more widely available, The Verge reported.
The video shows a drone automatically detecting obstacles and dodging them without any commands given by the user in its Autonomous flight mode. The video also shows the drone's 3D mapping technology using its inbuilt cameras and sensors. Motion planning functionality has also been shown.
The Snapdragon Flight board is built from a Snapdragon 801 processor, dual-band 2×2 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and GNSS location chips, Quick Charge technology to power up the batteries, and dual camera support with 4K video.
Qualcomm also expects that its platform will greatly reduce the cost of offering 4K video capable drones. The company estimates that the cost of a 4K camera drone could fall from $1,200 down to $300 or $400, while battery life could also increase to up to an hour.
The latest Snapdragon Flight offers an autonomous navigation mode, which after the drone filming, user can push a button and the UAV will return to the launch pad, avoiding any objects that block its path. The platform also offers an optical flow camera, obstacle mapping, visual inertial odometry and motion planning.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight platform is designed for high-end commercial and consumer drones as well as other robotic applications, according to NDTV Gadgets. It can be implemented as a reference design or customised further by developers.
