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Intel isn’t just making components for drones. The microprocessor and chip company has come out with a number of aircraft in the past year, including its small Shooting Star drones that flew to make a light show at the Super Bowl this year.
The company also makes an aircraft that has become popular for pipeline and cell tower inspection, the Falcon 8+. But today at the Code Conference at the Terranea Resort in California, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich clarified that the company is definitely not making a consumer drone.
Rather, Krzanich said Intel is more interested in data collected from commercial drones and processing that data to make it useful.
“Hundreds a year are killed inspecting power lines, inspecting gas lines and cellphone towers,” said Krzanich. “They fall. There are helicopter crashes. We can eliminate all that with autonomous drones and artificial intelligence.”
“We think of ourselves as a data company. We are the people who produce the products that are going to collect data and do the storage and transmission of all this data,” Krzanich explained, differentiating Intel from being thought of as only a CPU company. “We’re trying to optimize the performance and cost of that.”
Intel actually broke a world record last year when a single pilot flew 500 Shooting Star drones simultaneously in Germany.
But the company is perhaps best known in the drone world for its collision avoidance camera technology, Real Sense, which is used in Yuneec’s Typhoon H drone. Real Sense allows drones to weave between obstacles autonomously without being piloted.
Watch the full interview at Recode’s Code Conference below:
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
