Today at the Intel Developer Forum, CEO Brian Krzanichannounced both the company's Aero drone development board and a full ready-to-fly drone based on Aer on the company's RealSense sense-and-avoid solution, which is already used on the Yuneec Typhoon H drone. Both of them are using the Dronecode PX4 flight stack.
Both will be available in Q4 2016. The Aero board is $399 and the price for the whole drone has not been set. More details are here.
IDF San Francisco 2016 – Drones Intel Reveals UAV Developments and Availability of New Technologies at IDF Aug. 17, 2016 – Intel Corporation today announced its involvement in the development of multiple best-in-class unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly called drones, showcasing how they interact with their environment, solve problems and thrill users by helping them explore and interact with their worlds unlike ever before.
Intel® Aero Platform for UAVs Intel’s® Aero Platform is available today for developers to build their own drones. This purpose-built, UAV developer kit powered by an Intel® Atom™ quad-core processor combines compute, storage, communications and flexible I/O all in a form factor the size of a standard playing card. When matched with the optional Vision Accessory Kit, developers will have tremendous opportunities to launch sophisticated drone applications into the sky. Aero supports several “plug and play” options, including a flight controller with Dronecode PX4 software, Intel® RealSense™ technology for vision, AirMap SDK for airspace services, and will support LTE for communications. The Intel Aero Platform is available for preorder now on click.intel.com – the Intel Aero compute board is $399, the Intel Aero Vision Accessory Kit is $149, and the Intel Aero Enclosure Kit is $69.
A separate Intel Aero Platform Ready-to-Fly Drone will be available in Q4. Yuneec Typhoon H* with Intel RealSense Technology Now publically available, the Yuneec Typhoon H is the most advanced, compact aerial photography and videography platform available, featuring Intel RealSense technology. With an intelligent obstacle navigation system, the drone can see objects and self-navigate around them. The drone has an Intel RealSense camera and an Intel Atom processor while the ground station is also equipped with an Intel Atom processor. The Typhoon H with Intel RealSense technology is available for purchase for $1,899. AscTec Falcon 8* The AscTec Falcon 8 drone went into serial production in 2009 and has since been used globally for professional applications, most recently as an aerial inspection and surveying tool for Airbus*. The patented V-form octocopter is designed for precision and safety with the reliable AscTec HighPerformance GPS and the new control unit AscTec Trinity. It weighs only 2.3 kilograms on takeoff and works with maximum efficiency in the air, on- and offshore, even in challenging conditions.
Intel and Drone Policy Advocacy Intel CEO Brian Krzanich was recently appointed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to chair the Drone Advisory Council, a committee focused on addressing “integration strategies” regarding drones. In August, Brian addressed The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which includes experts in government, academia and industry, to discuss airspace integration, public and commercial uses, and ways to ensure safety, security and privacy in this emerging field. On Tuesday afternoon, Anil Nanduri (Vice President and General Manager, UAV Segment and Perceptual Computing Group at Intel), Earl Lawrence (Director, Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Office at the Federal Aviation Administration), Art Pregler (UAS Director at AT&T*), Ronnie Gnecco (Innovation Manager for UAVs at Airbus), and Shan Phillips (USA CEO at Yuneec) discussed how new drone capabilities and regulatory changes present new opportunities for drone developers
Comments
Kabir, I've not had time to try PX4 myself unfortunately. Just going by comments from users who used it with the Pixracer controller. There were a lot of issues, namely things like it appears the min throttle settings were not respected, so propellers could stop in the air depending on the PID output summing to Min. There were comments about it being unstable, etc. I'm just talking about the core flight functions. The vision stuff you guys are working on is pretty cool.
Patrick, interesting. I suppose that is why the vision-enabled flight speed is so low on the Typhoon, and yet it still gets REALLY close to that tree...
Ok, that Tencent thing is interesting. What is the application for something like that?
An important note about this new Intel system, is that it is already possible to build Ardupilot and load it directly onto the Compute board. You can actually glean quite a bit of information about the compute board (what sensors it uses, etc.) from looking at recent changes in the Ardupilot repository.
Is the PX4 source code intended to be loaded onto this system public?
Is the source code for the Yuneec Typhoon H public? Autel? Airdog?
Rob, I don't know when you last tried PX4 (maybe a couple of years back), but PX4 is definitely the premier flightstack for advance navigation and control integration. It's very much flyable.
About the open source / proprietary split, all features you need for flying with vision and controlling a vehicle are available in PX4 master since 2013. We're also continuously improving support wherever required. A video is worth a thousand words!
The Intel Aero should allow you to do this more or less in an integrated fashion without having to put together all the components. We were using a powerful i7 computer, however our stack translates well to a Bay Trail core as well.
Regarding the Snapdragon Flight, it's very much 'alive' but the prohibitive cost vs. computing advantage is not very feasible for developers. PX4 also runs on the Snapdragon just fine. We're flying one here, and it's decent for basic visual inertial control.
the spectrum receiver light is steady. means it is paired to the RC transmitter. snapdragon is closed source. pixhawk2 will definitely be open source. all eye are looking at the door when pixhawk 2 comes out of it. pixhawk is so reliable. I have never lost a drone as of now with pixhawk. open source thrills. pixhawk was built by heart. all others have been built by money.
Rob, there are a bunch of Chinese drones based on Snapdragon flight (and PX4) coming out in Q3 and Q4. Here is a glimpse of the first ones, from Zerotech:
I still dont get how you can make an autonomous vision based guidance/avoidance system with RealSense R200 that is limited to 1.2 Meter of Depth in the 3D video stream.... I guess I cannot race through the woods with this one :-(
So the Snapdragon Flight is a similar system that was announced almost a year ago.
http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/qualcomm-announces-snapdragon-b...
Whatever happened to that? Anybody doing anything interesting with it? Is it still available? Does this trump that? On a side note, I never did figure out why, in their video where they talk about optical path planning, visual odometry, and show soft-joysticks on a tablet, why does the machine in the video have a Spektrum Satellite Rx on the bottom? Was the whole video faked and it's just all manually flown?
Ravi, the Pixhawk2 will be available very soon:
http://www.proficnc.com/
whatever happened to pixhawk 2? would have been in the same category suppose.
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