Qualcomm Earns Its Wings As ‘Snapdragon Flight’ Drone Platform Demos Autonomous Navigation

A couple of months ago, chip monolith Qualcomm unveiled that it was developing a platform to help us take our drones to the next level. Aptly-named Snapdragon Flight, this is an all-in-one platform that lets drone creators produce some of the most advanced models we've ever seen, and we're not simply talking about being able to take great video here.

At its core, Snapdragon Flight is designed to offer beefy computation on board because drones that use it are meant to be as full-featured as possible. Qualcomm touts the support of 4K video capture with an optical flow camera as well as stereo cameras. What's going to be teased at CES is going to be even more impressive, though: autonomous drone flights.

In the video above, we're given a taste of what's to come. Drones equipped with Snapdragon Flight will effectively be able to plan out a flight path in advance, and while it's progressing, the software can make on-the-fly changes to ensure that there are no complications. Motion planning is used to help draw a virtual image of the surrounding area, while visual inertial odometry gives a value to almost every object in a scene to help it better understand its placement.

Putting it all like that is to put it simply. You should definitely watch the video, as both what Snapdragon Flight can do, along with the cool pumped-up music, might make you want the platform to launch as soon as possible.

We'll definitely relay more information as we get it at next week's CES.