Chinese fire up world's 'most powerful' drone brain

Chinese UAV outfit DJI is trumpeting the release of what it describes as the "most powerful computer designed for drones" – the "Manifold" embedded computer packing a quad-core ARM Cortex A-15 processor. The Manifold With NVIDIA's Tegra K1 and you've got the power to "transform aerial platforms into truly intelligent flying …

[Anonymous Coward]

"...embedded computer packing a quad-core ARM Cortex A-15 processor. Add to that NVIDIA's Tegra K1..."

Eh? Pretty certain the K1 is the "quad core A15"

Pity it isn't waterproof and half the price :(

[Lester Haines]

Typo there. Now corrected to read "With NVIDIA's Tegra K1 .."

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmmm.. nice try L.. but perhaps you should also change the ensuing "and you've got a recipe for" to something more along the lines of "is a recipe to" to fully correct the... "typo"?

;)

[Lester Haines]

That probably would be ideal, wouldn't it?

[Anonymous Coward]

letters

[John Savard]

The Nvidia Tegra K1 is a particular quad-core ARM A-15 processor, which adds a nice GPU to those four cores. Which is probably what led to the mistake in the wording.

[Isendel Steel]

All right Jack

For external audio output of course - Ride of the Valkyries

[Daniel Hall]

$499?????

Done you mean £409?????

Has this site become another casualty sold off to some shitty US firm?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably cut'npaste press release, so worse...

[Lester Haines]

I gather they use the US$ for the base price, and calculate from that. £409 looks like today's conversion. It's a pretty odd figure.

[Daniel Hall]

What I am getting at is this.

This is a UK based tech site and this is a story for for a Chinese drone, we have only been given one price, in US dollars.

My question, why?

Why do I read a UK site if I have to go off and convert the price to a UK amount?

I might as well go back to the uk-not-so-uk tomshardware.co.uk or whatever.

[Aitor 1]

Price

Chinese company: they sell in $, converting to pounds makes no sense, as thyou would haave to be correcting the article.

[SminkyBazzA]

If you're a Chrome user, why not get the autoConvert plugin that will do the hard work for you?

[Daniel Hall]

Dont*

Oh the irony of my own post.... oops

[ZSn]

Raspberry pi

Considering the cost, is the raspberry pi2 up to the job? For less than one tenth of the price surely that would be first port of call to test out principles, or is this box vastly superior in performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Raspberry pi

Vastly superior in performance.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Raspberry pi

Seriously vast performance advantage. Except for the flying component, they've hit every box of my dream machine. (I'm into ground based and sub-surface, waterborne and submarine.) The K1 makes for a nifty signal processor with nVidia tooling.

BTW first use of airborne is reporter/paparazzi in a box. And they thought the recent fires here in California we had were hard to deconflict? Child's play.

[Mage]

Re: Raspberry pi

This a a Raspberry Pi on steroids. The original Pi is built down to a price and is barely more than an obsolete phone chip on a breakout board. The Pi series is fine for the money. But if you have more money and want a more powerful ARM with much more I/O then this is it. I wish it cost 1/2 as much though.

At a bit lower price this would be very nice for all kinds of projects where the Pi lacks I/O or CPU power.

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh....

why does a drone need Ethernet? I mean, it seems a strange way to use space on a system where they are aiming at the drone crowd.

[bozoid]

Re: Eh....

I'm wondering why a drone needs a non-realtime OS like Ubuntu...

[TheBigCat]

Re: Eh....

I assume you can program it, give it updates and transfer data more easily.

[Voland's right hand]

I think it is time to start mounting erlicones on the house corners

That has enough grunt to run most algos for abominably precise targeting and "under radar" flight which used to be a privilege of the likes of Raytheon or Almaz systems. Anything you can think of - terrain guidance by profile matching (cruise missiles), last stage guidance by visual, IR, UV or radar sig. You name it.

All you need is to mount it on one of these https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=potAETW-VG8 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa-TSNeTK-A instead of a puny electric quadcopter along with a laser altimeter and a few cameras for the terminal guidance. A few kg of high explosive optional.

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Re: I think it is time to start mounting erlicones on the house corners

Did you mean Oerlikon, as in the Swiss arms manufacturer?

[Voland's right hand]

Re: I think it is time to start mounting erlicones on the house corners

Thanks for the correction. I meant the particular Oerlikon goods which supposedly neutral Switherland shipped to all warring parties in WW2. Namely this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oerlikon_20_mm_cannon. While it is not the best in class today (that title goes to the Soviet/Russian ZPU), you can pretend that it is an antique garden ornament commemorating Swiss neutrality in WW2.

[TheBigCat]

X-47B

I would suspect that the X-47B or several other drones have more advanced computers.

Bill

[annodomini2]

Re: X-47B

Probably not, most military and aerospace control systems use established HW with known predictable errors and appropriate responses to those issues and countermeasures implemented.

They will also run an aerospace specific RTOS, no need to run Linux.

Most of the processing power in this is to run the OS, 99% of control systems don't actually need an OS of this magnitude.

E.g. The flight control system on the first generation F16's was built in the 70s using that era's technology.

[TheBigCat]

Re: X-47B

Since the X-47B is new, does carrier landings, aerial refueling, and fighting other aircraft I would assume it has more processing power. It probably has extra CPU capacity so that it can deal with always updating software.

[John Savard]

Dual-use

Well, pretty soon now we won't be able to get smartphones and tablets with fancy ARM processors in them made cheaply in China any more, now that it's been shown that they can be used for military purposes in things like drones!

[YARR]

It doesn't look very rain-proof does it?

[Your alien overlord - fear me]

So now the perverts can video your daughter in the back garden and using real time video processing, when it sees you coming out with a shotgun, it automatically goes Crazy Ivan to avoid getting hit. Ah, the progress of technology.

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Crazy Ivan?

Way too predictable:

Jack Ryan:

Has he made any Crazy Ivans?

Capt. Bart Mancuso:

What difference does that make?

Jack Ryan:

Because his next one is going to be to starboard.

Capt. Bart Mancuso:

Why? Because his last was to port?

Jack Ryan:

No. Because he always goes to starboard in the bottom half of the hour.

[John Brown (no body)]

truly intelligent flying robots

Errr, what? AI doesn't work even on huge, big (and heavy) supercomputers or mainframes. I'll take a wild guess and assume that line is straight from the press release with little or no interpretation by a journalist writing for a highly tech aware audience.

EDIT: Oh, hang on. I just noticed. It's Lester. Carry on then, as you were.

[Tom 7]

Why ARM?

I'm a great ARM fan but in a drone power is not really a problem - if it is Adapteva Parallela gives you best bang for watt.

Is there a reason why everyone uses batteries in drones when its really easy to get watts from glow plugs which are much better power to weight and pretty reliable. And no they are no noisy if you feed the exhaust into a decent silencer.

[ZippedyDooDah]

Re: Why ARM?

Pray tell what a "glow plug" is other than a device to help a diesel engine fire when it's cold.

[razorfishsl]

if the logo is anything to go by "the future of possible", you know it has a strong possibility of being produced for $10us in Shenzhen......

Plus with the size of those connectors and a fullsize HDMI socket, it looks more like a failed overpriced TVbox that has found a new market