As a leader in the drone industry, it's reasonable if DJI
wants to keep a step further than its competitors. This time, this Chinese
manufacturer announces its latest innovation in the form of a computer package
that's designed to accompany a drone in flight.
DJI is not alone in developing the computer called Manifold.
It works together with Canonical, which is the developer team of the most
popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu. Yup, this also means that DJI Manifold will
run with Ubuntu 14:04 OS, to be exact is Long Term Support (LTS).
Manifold itself so far is only compatible with DJI Matrice
100 that's intended for developers. Manifold can be easily tethered to the
container module of Matrice 100, and also can be connected with other devices
such as infrared cameras and other research support tools via the USB port,
HDMI and Ethernet.
DJI Manifold is powered by Nvidia Tegra K1 chipset which consists
of quad-core processor and Kepler GPU. This GPU serves to provide powerful
image processing performance, and at the same time efficient parallel computing
power.
DJI claims that Manifold's computing capability can be equal
to the PC's graphics card, it's capable of processing high-resolution images in
real-time. And as the result, the developer can apply the Artificial
Intelligence (AI) such as computer vision technology and deep learning in the
DJI Matrice 100.
For those who already have DJI Matrice 100, it would not
hurt to try the Manifold which is offered at $ 499. The presence of Manifold is
also a proof that the application of Artifical Intelligence on drones is one of
DJI's obsessions in the future, so that DJI drones later will be able to fly by
themselves while avoiding various barriers.