Qualcomm says it is unleashing a new era of autonomous drone capabilities with its 5G and AI-enabled drone platform.

Qualcomm’s Flight RB5 5G platform can accelerate and scale development for drone manufacturers to deliver, purpose-built enterprise and industrial 5G drones.

The drone platform and reference design provide both 5G and AI capabilities. These can accelerate development for commercial, enterprise and industrial drones, and help industries adopt drones and realise the benefits of the intelligent edge.

The platform, powered by the Qualcomm QRB5165 processor, builds on the firm’s latest IoT offerings. As a driver of global 5G proliferation, Qualcomm is helping enable 5G to scale and change the robotics and drone industry. The platform condenses multiple complex technologies into one tightly integrated drone system to support evolving applications and new use cases in sectors including film and entertainment, security and emergency response, delivery, defence, inspection, and mapping.

“We have continued to engage many leading drone companies, enabling 200+ global robotics and drone ecosystem members in addition to consistently driving and promoting worldwide drone standardisation and transformative 5G capabilities in organisations such as 3GPP, GSMA, Global UTM Alliance, Aerial Connectivity Joint Initiative and ASTM,” said Dev Singh, senior director at Qualcomm. “We are proud to continue our momentum of enabling the digital transformation of global industries by unveiling the Qualcomm Flight RB5 5G platform, that is purpose-built for drone development with enhanced autonomy and intelligence features, bringing premium connected flight capabilities to industrial, enterprise and commercial segments.”

The platform’s heterogeneous computing at low power consumption provides power efficient inferencing at the edge for AI and machine learning enabling fully autonomous drones. It has camera capabilities to deliver premium images.

With 5G and Wifi 6 connectivity, this platform enhances critical flying abilities beyond visual line-of-sight (BVLoS) to support safer, more reliable flight. In addition, safety controls alone can no longer assure industrial and commercial drone safety, especially when scaling to BVLoS operations. The platform has a Qualcomm secure processing unit to support modern drone demands for cyber-security protections as an enabler of data-protection and safety requirements.

Qualcomm is working with Verizon to complete network testing of the platform for the Verizon 5G network, and expects the platform, which is 5G mm-wave capable, will be offered via the Verizon Thingspace marketplace.

“The Qualcomm Flight RB5 5G platform provides a robust hardware platform that can be certified for the Verizon 5G network, offering the ecosystem of drone developers a simple path to get connected,” said Eric Ringer, chief of staff at Skyward, a Verizon company. “That means drones built with the platform can leverage the massive capacity of Verizon 5G ultra-wideband to navigate the National Airspace System in safer and more productive ways than ever before.”

The drone reference design is available for pre-sale now through ModalAI. The 5G development kit is expected to be available before the end of the year.

“ModalAI accelerates autonomy by providing innovators with robot and drone perception and communications systems,” said Chad Sweet, CEO of ModalAI. “Since our founding, we have committed to enabling aerial and ground robot manufacturers with capabilities that can excel a broad set of industries. We are thrilled to collaborate with Qualcomm to bring the first purpose-built 5G drone that opens cutting-edge computing to a broad set of integrators who can build their applications that take advantage of the coming aerial 5G wave.”

Kevin Hetrick, vice-president at AT&T, added: “Many of the anticipated benefits of drones will be further accelerated and strengthened with 5G, including delivery, inspections, and search and rescue, which will require a highly secure and reliable connection. We are excited to see Qualcomm continue to innovate with their latest announcement on a platform for 5G drones,”

His opinion was shared by Li Kai, chief product officer for China Unicom’s IoT division, who said: “The 5G-enabled digital era has brought wider boundaries for every industry and China Unicom is committed to pushing the boundaries of the traditional communications ecosystem and working together with the industrial chain to realise mutual complementarity. As one of our important collaborators, Qualcomm has been working with China Unicom to drive integration of 5G and IoT into vertical use cases and provide products such as 5G modules and 5G industrial gateways for automation and robotics use cases, with focused areas including industrial equipment, iron and steel manufacturing, transportation and port, mining and energy, and healthcare.”