Qualcomm Flight™ RB5 5G Reference Design

Purchase from ModalAI

Qualcomm Flight RB5 Product Brief

You’ve built autonomy into your drone applications with artificial intelligence (AI). How can you get the long-range connectivity you need to extend your network edge as far as possible?

The Qualcomm Flight RB5 Reference Design combines camera capabilities and heterogeneous AI computing power with long range connectivity with Wi-Fi 6 and optional 5G. It boosts your computer vision (CV) apps with edge inferencing and gives you coverage and autonomous navigation far beyond the line of sight.

The reference design incorporates the Qualcomm Flight RB5 5G Platform, making it ideal for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in applications like disaster relief, asset inspection, mapping, package delivery and film/entertainment. The platform is engineered for low power consumption, long range, high performance and low latency, with features like these:

  • Qualcomm® QRB5165 processor
  • On-board Wi-Fi 6 for swarm and drone-to-drone communication
  • Optional 5G/LTE through optional mezzanine board
  • Qualcomm® Artificial Intelligence Engine delivering up to 15 trillion operations per second (TOPS) for deep-learning workloads and autonomous flight
  • Qualcomm® Hexagon™ Tensor Accelerator (HTA) with up to 8 TOPS for accurate edge inferencing
  • Qualcomm Spectra™ 480 CV image signal processor (ISP) for 8K video recording and 4K high dynamic range (HDR) video capture with 7-camera concurrency

Your software environment on the reference design consists of Ubuntu 18.04 Linux distribution built using Yocto Dunfell on Kernell 4.19, ROS 2 and PX4. Supported SDKs include the Qualcomm® Neural Processing SDK for optimizing deep learning workloads, the Qualcomm® Computer Vision SDK for gesture recognition and face detection, and the Hexagon DSP SDK for compelling multimedia.

Offered and supported by ModalAI, the reference design is backed by technical documentation including a quick start guide, manuals and data sheets, plus software downloads.

Take the next step in your drone and UAV development with the world’s first 5G- and AI-enabled drone platform and reference design based on the Qualcomm Flight RB5 5G Platform.

And if you're interested in additional robotics solutions from Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., we encourage you to review related content on our Qualcomm Robotics Solutions page.



Qualcomm Flight RB5, Qualcomm QRB5165, Qualcomm Artificial Intelligence Engine, Qualcomm Hexagon and Qualcomm Spectra are products of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.