The engineers at Airlango started with the goal of creating deeper interaction between humans and unmanned aerial vehicles. Building from the base of artificial intelligence they designed a drone that could recognize, track, and keep focus on a main user. Their project, Mystic, is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter.
Mystic’s best selling point is the large number of features built into the system. Beyond normal vision-assisted flight control offered to the user five different flight modes exist: 3D tracking, intelli-gesture, template photo, template video and safari. All five modes are demonstrated on the campaign page and on the company’s website. The proprietary neural engine for the system can track several different models, and combines motion detection with stereo vision and pose recognition.
Mystic is a small drone that weighs in at 470 grams, 285 millimeters wide on the diagonal axis, and 160 x 96 x 55 millimeters when folded. The 3000 milliAmp hour battery is expected to generate thirty minutes of flight time and achieve a top speed of 20 meters per second. The range is 300 meters out of the box or can be boosted up to 800 meters. The system uses a Snapdragon 820 processor, an Adreno 530 graphics card, 4 Gigabytes of RAM and a quad-core 64-bit ARM CPU. Two stereo camera sensors, two inertial measurement unit sensors, a gps, a barometer, an optical flow sensor and a time of flight sensor are all incorporated into the UAV as well.
This drone system looks feature heavy and incredibly ambitious. It’s promising to think that all of the artificial intelligence advances we’ve been seeing in the last five years could be so easily applied to a drone, and I’m only a little skeptical that Airlango can deliver what they’re selling. Another point worth noting is the graphics card and Sony IMX378 sensor, making the camera closer to a Google Pixel than other drones. This campaign ends on August 9 and delivery of drones is estimated at November 2018.