You'll soon be able to easily build your own drone from scratch thanks to Intel, which has announced a new unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform called the Ready to Fly' kit.
Offering everything you need to get your own flying robot up in the air, Intel's CEO Brian Krzanich announced the quadcopter platform at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco.
"We have two developer kits giving you ways, to make yourself, in the drone world," announced the Intel chief. "The first one is what we call Project Aero, a board that allows developers the ability to launch their own drones and applications into the sky.
Intel's fresh development board, project Aero is powered by an Atom quad-core processor and combines compute, storage, communications and flexible I/O all in a form factor the size of a standard playing card.
"Aero supports several in flight options including a flight controller, Real Sense for vision, SSD support, LTE communications so you can transmit data over 4G and mapping capabilities, this is a complete drone system in one board," added Krzanich.
"But we didn't want to stop there, we wanted to provide a complete offering, so what we have here is a complete drone platform, so you can get into the air."
Powered by its new Aero board, Intel's Ready to Fly drone developer kit is designed from the ground up to enable developers, researchers, and UAV enthusiasts to give their self-built machines wings.
Ready to fly' kit also includes a PX4-based controller and is said to be "a fully-assembled quadcopter with compute board and integrated depth and vision capabilities using Intel RealSense Technology."
While the Aero compute board is available for $399 at click.intel.com, the Aero Ready To Fly Drone platform will be available by quarter one next year, Krzanich said.
As part of the announcement, Intel said the Yuneec Typhoon H drone, which is powered by Intel RealSense Technology to intelligently avoid obstacles during navigation is now available, for $1,899.
