Kespry and NVIDIA Demonstrate Object Recognition Drone AI

By Mike Ball / 12 Nov 2015
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Kespry Drone SystemKespry, a developer of unmanned aerial systems for commercial applications, has announced that it has demonstrated a prototype drone that uses NVIDIA artificial intelligence technology to recognize objects.

The state-of-the-art Kespry prototype uses an NVIDIA Jetson TX1 module for deep learning, which offers complex algorithms to make autonomous devices more intelligent. The prototype is based on the Kespry Drone System that is in use by customers in the materials, mining and construction industries.

“This technology has great potential for the commercial drone market,” said Paul Doersch, Founder and CEO, Kespry. “Today, Kespry customers already use aerial data gathered by our drones to calculate distances, sizes, and volumes. With NVIDIA’s new machine learning module, companies will be able to specifically identify construction vehicles, building materials and other structures, so they’ll have even more relevant information to manage their job sites using commercial drones.”

The demo was conducted using the NVIDIA Jetson TX1 embedded module which was unveiled at an NVIDIA event in San Francisco. Jetson TX1 is a credit-card sized module that will enable a new generation of smart, learning autonomous devices. With its 1 teraflops of performance, Jetson delivers exceptional performance for machine learning, computer vision, GPU computing, and graphics, while drawing very little power.

“Kespry’s prototype drone with Jetson TX1 is a vision of the future, when robots and drones will see, think and navigate on their own,” said Deepu Talla, VP and GM, Tegra, NVIDIA. “Jetson TX1 will enable a new generation of incredibly capable autonomous devices.”

Posted by Mike Ball Mike Ball is our resident technical editor here at Unmanned Systems Technology. Combining his passion for teaching, advanced engineering and all things unmanned, Mike keeps a watchful eye over everything related to the unmanned technical sector. With over 10 years’ experience in the unmanned field and a degree in engineering, Mike’s been heading up our technical team here for the last 8 years. Connect & Contact