Qualcomm Demonstrates Flying/Rolling UAS at CES

At CES 2015, Qualcomm Research is introducing its latest innovation in robotics through the Snapdragon Cargo—a flying and rolling robot with an integrated flight controller—powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.

Inside Snapdragon Cargo is a multi-functional computing platform. This hardware and software platform is built around the Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC to provide a low-power solution that integrates multi-core processing, wireless communications, sensor integration, positioning and real-time I/O for multiple robotics applications.

Also running on this integrated platform are Computer Vision technologies that enable the Cargo and other robots to better perceive their environment.

To enable robotics applications that can better perceive their environment, Qualcomm Research is working on a Machine Vision Research SDK, which includes key Computer Vision (CV) technologies. The following are three major CV technologies that are part of this SDK, with more to come:

1. Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) – tracks 3D position and 3D orientation in unknown, feature-sparse environments, using both inertial sensors and camera.
2. Vision-only Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (VSLAM) – tracks 3D position and 3D orientation in texture-rich environments while creating a sparse landmarks (keypoints) map. VSLAM is used for 3D reconstruction.
3. Depth From Stereo cameras (DFS) – provides depth information used for collision avoidance and 3D reconstruction.

Qualcomm Research will be showing live demonstrations of these CV technologies running on the Snapdragon Cargo while it’s in flight, at its robotics booth at CES.

Source: Press Release