DJI announces small computer "Manifold" with Tegra K1 that gives intelligence to drone

DJI, the world's largest maker of drone for consumers, has a drone computer with a dramatically improved processing capabilityManifoldWe announced. Manifold is a small computer that can be installed in the company's drones, and it is said that it will be possible to evolve existing drone into "flying robot" with high processing capability.

DJI Developer
https://developer.dji.com/en/manifold/

DJI Forum | DJI launches new Manifold embedded computer for aerial platform developers
http://forum.dji.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=34669

Manifold announced by DJI, NVIDIA's Soc "Tegra K1"Ubuntu Linux system is adopted as the OS in the computer that is equipped with.


Manifold is also a drone type developer platform that DJI will line up as "Matrice 100"It is designed to be mounted and used, and it is expected to be applied to various applications utilizing drone.


Tegra K1 installed in Manifold is a SoC with quad-core Cortex-A15 in the CPU and 192 NVIDIA CUDA cores in the GPU, the maximum number of clocks is 2.2 GHz. In addition to being mounted on mobile terminals such as smartphones, it is also used as a processor for processing mounted on automobiles by taking advantage of its high processing capacity. Manifild is a computer that enables you to skip the drone with this "strongest class mobile processor".


By installing Manifold, drone will be able to perform sophisticated processing in real time during flight. In addition to being able to process high resolution images taken with cameras in real time, they can use the latest AI (artificial intelligence) applications such as "computer vision" based on images and deep learning. In addition to simply sending information captured by sensors, it means that you can recognize and respond to objects yourself, which means that you will no longer have a brain to say "robot" so.

Developed for developers, Manifold adopts Ubuntu as OS, and it supports development environments and libraries such as CUDA, OpenCV, ROS. Also, it is possible to operate the DJI Onboard SDK at the native level, acquire flight data, implement intelligent control, and analyze data.

It is Manifold with high processing power, but it is also one of the features that low power consumption is low. The maximum power consumption at peak time is about 15 watts, and very low energy consumption is realized because it is equipped with Tegra K1.

Also, the main body is equipped with USB, Ethernet, Mini-PCIe, HDMI, UART, SPI, I2C terminals, and it has a high scalability such as connecting various sensors and it is useful for developers It is likely to become.


Although the momentum of the aerial drone for general consumers can be seen, the drone's cutting-edge world is shifting to the next stage of utilization. In the future, in parallel with fun drones, it is likely that development of high performance drone will be promoted.