There is no doubt that professional drones are facilitating activities such as surveillance of areas such as agricultural or roadways, infrastructure maintenance, aerial capture for audiovisual purposes, among other possibilities.
Qualcomm wants to continue improving the capabilities of professional drones to make them more efficient and accurate. To this end, the company known for its mobile processors takes an important step with the presentation of the Flight RB5 5G platform, with which it hopes to serve as a reference to accelerate the development of commercial, business, and industrial drones to take them to various activities such as security, defense, delivery of objects, mapping of areas, and even for the world of entertainment.
The company has several collaborations with NASA, as its technology has been used in the Ingenuity helicopter to fly for months over the planet Mars, with great success, although it was also used in the Perseverance Rover for image management and processing.
Given the collaborations and with everything learned by both parties, Qualcomm now reflects it in its new drone-focused platform as an inspiration for the professional drone segment.
In this regard, Dev Singh, general manager of Qualcomm’s robotics, drones, and machine intelligence unit, notes that the Qualcomm RB5 5G platform is specific to drones, whereas the Qualcomm RB5 was specific to robotics.
According to Qualcomm, its new platform for drones is composed of the QRB5165 processor, by tools for the Internet of Things, in addition to its low power consumption, besides having 5G and WiFi 6 connectivity, wherein the case of WiFi 6 connectivity, the company points out that it has made some adjustments to improve the line of sight of the flights, going from 6 km to 8 km.
The company hopes that in the future, thanks to the step it has just taken, it will serve segments such as the Internet of Things and the flow of IT data to be widely deployed.
Sing said “Drones will be out there doing multiple things and surveillance, vision and GPS and data aggregation will be a critical part of the data flows.”
The reference design is available through ModalAI, while the Qualcomm Flight RB5 5G development kit will be made publicly available throughout the fourth quarter of this year.
