The Parallel Ultra-Low Power (PULP) Platform has announced a partnership between ETH Zurich, Greenwaves Technology, and Bitcraze to develop a PULP-powered and wireless artificial intelligence module for drone use: the AI Deck.
Based on the earlier PULP-Shield, built as part of the PULP-DroNet project, the AI Shield is designed to control a Crazyflie 2.0 micro-drone. The original design partnered GreenWaves’ GAP8 RISC-V system-on-chip with two off-chip memories, a QVGA ultra-low-power camera, and the control pins required to have the device fly the drone under control of the DroNet convolutional neural network (CNN.)
“[AI Deck] is a collaborative product between GreenWaves Technologies, ETH Zurich and Bitcraze,” says Bitcraze’s Tobias Antonsson of the upgraded design. “It is based on the PULP-Shield that the Integrated and System Laboratory has designed. The difference with the PULP-Shield is that we have added a ESP32, the NINA-W102 module, so that video can be streamed over WiFi. This we hope will ease development and add more use cases.”
The AI Deck is due to be demonstrated by Bitcraze during the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Montreal next week, with more information available on the Bitcraze blog. Additional details on the PULP-DroNet project and PULP-Shield can be found in another blog post on the site.
Gareth Halfacree is a technology journalist and technical author best known for his work on the Raspberry Pi User Guide and an upcoming book covering the BBC’s micro:bit project. A keen open source advocate and RISC-V fan, Gareth is responsible for curating our fortnightly community round-up posts.