The unmanned quadcopter platform is aimed at the educational market and professional developers. RS Components has announced that it now has Intel® Aero Ready to Fly Drone, a development platform powered by various Intel technologies that offers developers and researchers a fast track to creating aerial applications. The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Development Kit offers professional application developers unfamiliar with drone mechanics and avionics the ability to focus on application software and sensor hardware and ensure optimization of data and services.
Among the typical applications of drones are the delivery of goods, inspection and surveillance, as well as possible uses in the agriculture and construction sector. The open and flexible nature of the platform, along with the use of open source software, ease of licensing, and affordability of hardware, make this kit ideal for use in colleges and universities. The Intel® Aero Platform provides a complete drone development ecosystem and includes the Intel ® Aero Compute Board, Intel ® Aero Vision Accessory Kit, and Intel ® Aero Flight Controller with Dronecode PX4 autopilot software. Also includes electronic speed controllers, motors, compass, GPS, transmitter and receiver, and carbon fiber airframe. The only additional component you need is a battery to get the system up and running quickly and easily.
The brains of the complete open source quadcopter is the Intel Aero Compute Board, powered by a quad-core Intel ® Atom processor that combines compute, storage, communications, and flexible I/O in a form factor the size of a playing card. The board also features Intel ® RealSense technology, which provides vision and depth, and a flight controller pre-programmed with Dronecode PX4 software and supports the AirMap SDK for airspace services. For flight vision and sensing capabilities, the Vision Accessory Kit includes the Intel RealSense R200 camera, a high-resolution 8-megapixel camera, and a VGA camera with associated cables. Also available is the Intel ® Aero Enclosure Kit, which is a mechanical enclosure specifically designed to house the Compute Board and Vision Accessory Kit with three cameras. An optional device for the Intel ® Aero Ready to Fly Drone is the newly released Movidius™ Neural Computation Unit (NCS), which provides next-generation deep learning inference, perception and advanced computing vision.
