Will they be able to do for drones what they did for smartphones?

Qualcomm, a technology company that made their fortune on providing processors and SoCs for phones are now looking to expand to another new venture: drones. The company has teased their newest product, dubbed Snapdragon Flight, ahead of its unveil in this year’s CES. Snapdragon Flight is essentially a platform for drones, offering OEMs a complete back-end solution for their drone ambitions, which include an optical flow camera, obstacle mapping capabilities, inertial odometry and motion planning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D96TWllOUg

What all of that fancy talk means is that drones powered by Snapdragon Flight can now autonomously return home while intelligently avoiding obstacles along the way, something even high-end, current generation drones can’t do on their own. Snapdragon Flight is powered by the company’s 801 processor and is paired with an Adreno 330 GPU and has 4K video recording capabilities along with their Quick Charge technology. Drone purveyor Yuneec is the first company to get dibs on Qualcomm’s new platform, though no release date has been set as of yet for their Snapdragon Flight equipped model.