Home / Snapdragon Flight - Best drone support for ROS and PX4

Enable the Smallest Autonomous Drones

Snapdragon Flight was Qualcomm's first major product release for the UAS (ie drone) market. It enabled developers to create the smallest autonomous drones out there. Snapdragon Flight was so capable it even ended up on Mars!

Qualcomm Flight Pro followed up Snapdragon Flight two years later. The ModalAI leadership team are the same engineers that developed Snapdragon Flight and Qualcomm Flight Pro at Qualcomm Research. ModalAI's VOXL is built on the Qualcomm Flight Pro architecture, and includes comprehensive documentation and support.

The Qualcomm Flight RB5 5G succeeded the Qualcomm Flight Pro with even more processing and AI capabilities to add to the Qualcomm Development Drone catalog.

Accessibility and ease of use are really important to the team at ModalAI, and much of their effort is spent making autonomous drones easy to develop and deploy for a broad range of applications.

Open Development Kit for Drones

VOXL improves on Qualcomm Flight Pro and Snapdragon Flight by including: 
  • PX4 Flight Control, Avoidance and GPS-denied Navigation (VIO)
  • ROS and MAVROS Autonomous Navigation
  • Snapdragon Navigator flight controller
  • Beyond Visual Line of Sight flight over 4G / LTE (demo)

Ready to Use Kits Accelerate Development

We make many configurations of VOXL available to ease integration into your sUAS or robotics application:

  • Stand-alone Development Kit (Buy Here)
  • Machine Vision Development Kit (Buy Here)
  • Mounted and calibrated Development Kit (Flight Deck Buy Here)
  • A complete Reference Drone! (m500 Buy Here)
  • A Snapdragon and PX4 flight controller in one PCB (VOXL Flight Buy Here)

 

m500 Development Drone

 

Software Features

  • Open source Linux kernel, cross-compilers, PX4, ROS, OpenCV
  • Docker build environment for CPU, GPU (OpenCL) and DSP (Hexagon SDK) heterogeneous computer vision and deep learning processing.
  • Run Docker on VOXL target for improved portability and maintenance.
  • Add cellular LTE connectivity for beyond visual line of sight (add-on).

Specifications

  • Snapdragon 821: Quad-core up to 2.15GHz, GPU, 2xDSP, Linux
  • Video support: 3x MIPI cameras, UVC 
  • Machine vision support: time synchronized IMU and cameras
  • Additional I/O: WiFi, SPI, I2C, UART, GPIO
  • Light weight, powerful, SWAP-optimized computing:
    • PCB weight 18g
    • Power Module weight 13g
    • Cameras (6g)
    • Power consumption 3-10W