Snapdragon Flight - Best drone support for ROS and PX4

Snapdragon Flight: Where This Started

In 2015 Qualcomm Research shipped Snapdragon Flight, its first major product for the drone market. It did something that had not been done: it put a full flight controller and a Linux companion computer on one small board, at a time when autonomy meant strapping a single-board computer to an airframe and hoping the wiring held. Suddenly the smallest autonomous drones were possible.

The team that built it went on to found ModalAI. The engineers who designed Snapdragon Flight at Qualcomm Research are the same people designing our autopilots now, which is why this line of work has continued without interruption for a decade.

It Flew on Mars

Snapdragon Flight ended up aboard NASA JPL's Ingenuity helicopter — the first aircraft to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. ModalAI's CEO and co-founder, Chad Sweet, led the Snapdragon Flight project at Qualcomm. That story is here.

What Came Next

• Qualcomm Flight Pro followed about two years later, adding processing, connectivity and machine vision to the same idea.
• VOXL was built directly on the Qualcomm Flight Pro architecture, with components refreshed to keep the platform maintainable and available for years rather than months. It has since reached end of life.
• VOXL 2 and VOXL 2 Mini are where it is today — an order of magnitude more compute in a smaller, lighter package.

Where the Line Is Today

The architecture is still in production, still supported weekly, and still built by the same engineers. It is now two boards:

Both are NDAA '20 Section 848 compliant, assembled in the USA and on the Blue UAS Framework list. If you want a complete aircraft, Starling 2 Max and Stinger Vision FPV fly on them. See VOXL for the full line-up.

Also from this lineage: the Qualcomm Flight RB5 5G Platform, and the development drones built on these boards.