MIT researchers design a tiny computer chip for drones as small as a fingernail
Drones as small as a fingernail may one day buzz overhead, thanks to research out of the Massachusetts Institue of Technology (MIT). A team in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) designed a 20 square millimeter computer chip that can process inertial and camera images — two critical components of drone flight — in real time.
It isn’t the team’s first microchip rodeo. Last year, it used a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), a type of highly configurable integrated circuit, to develop a drone control chip that required just 2 watts of power and 2GB of memory. But shrinking the design wasn’t easy.
In the end, the researchers decided to build the new chip from the ground up. They found a way to minimize the amount of data that’s stored on its memory at any given time, reducing the chip’s power consumption to 24 milliwatts — 1 one-thousandth of the energy required to power a lightbulb — and the size of its memory to 0.8MB.
They also optimized the design for image processing. The new chip can handle up to 171 frames per second, a rate even faster than what the team projected.
The chip isn’t bound for mini-drones just yet. The team’s proof-of-concept will be a miniature race car with an onboard camera that’ll stream live video. Next, it’s planning to build it into an actual drone.
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/20/mit-researchers-design-a-tiny-computer-chip-for-drones-as-small-as-a-fingernail/