In a move that wouldn’t come as a surprise to many, Intel has announced its first fully self-branded drone, the Falcon 8+, which has been designed for use in industrial sector. The drone has been developed by Ascending Technologies, which was acquired by the company in January this year.
The Falcon 8+ has been designed for commercial uses like inspection, surveying, and mapping. The drone is essentially a successor to AscTec Falcon 8 and has been developed keeping North American markets in mind. The drone can achieve speeds up to 35 miles per hour (56.3 kilometres per hour) and has a take-off weight of 2.8kg.
The drone features a new Intel Cockpit, which is waterproof for use in harsh outdoor environments. “The Intel Cockpit integrates independent control and safety features with low latency digital video link. This supports payloads with up to 1080p resolutions for the best possible live view,” Intel says on its website.
Intel has shown its interest in machine vision throughout this year as the company acquired the machine-vision firm Movidius in September. Movidius was already working with companies such as Google, DJI, FLIR, and Lenovo to provide its vision technology to various electronic devices such as drones, security cameras, AR/VR headsets etc.
Previously, the company announced Project Euclid, at its Intel Developers Forum in August, based on company’s RealSense perceptual computing platform. Meant to help power machine vision, Joule was termed as a powerful developer kit that’s essentially a tiny computer for devices that use cameras for vision, like robots or drones.
It will be interesting to see how the company performs with its latest product as the competition is relatively less in the commercial sector for unmanned aerial vehicles.