Intel comes with development boards for DIY robots and drones

Intel will release development kits for robots and drones under the names Robotic Development Kit and Aero Kit. The kits contain the necessary hardware and software to build robots and drones. Intel announced the kits at its Developer Forum in Shenzhen, China.

An important part of the development boards is the RealSense 3d camera, a camera with a depth sensor, which is supplied with the kits. The camera should help the robots and drones navigate in the real world.

The Robotic Development Kit consists of a credit card-sized development board from Aaeon. The board is equipped with an Intel Atom x5 Z8350 CPU, an HD 400 GPU, 4GB DDR3 RAM and 32GB storage memory. In addition, the whole contains an HDMI output, Ethernet connection, two USB 2.0 ports, a USB 3.0 port, camera and an embedded display port. To connect other boards, components and sensors, the board also features a 40-pin GPIO slot. Ubuntu is included as OS, although it also supports several Windows versions, including Windows 10.

The Aero Kit is ‘ready to fly’ and has an Intel Atom x7-Z8700 processor on board. In addition, the kit has DDR3L RAM and flash storage, although it is not clear how much that is. The whole thing will run on a ‘version of embedded Linux’. It may be Ubuntu Core because Intel has been working with Canonical for some time in the field of internet-of-things devices. An Intel spokesperson could not provide further information, PC World writes.

It is not yet clear when the Aero Kit will be released and what it will cost. It is known that the Robotic Development Kit will ship from June and costs $249.