The Robotic Development Kit and Aero Kit provide the necessary hardware and software tools to build robots and drones. It is darn useful for those considering building a robot army for taking over the world.

At the heart of the cuts are the RealSense 3D camera, which help the robots and drones navigate and avoid obstacles. The depth-sensing camera can recognise items and determine the size, shape and contours of objects. For robots, the camera provides computer vision.

Each kit will sell for $249 and will ship later this quarter. It has a credit-card-sized board from Aaeon, which is equipped with an Intel Atom x5 Z8350 CPU, an internal Intel HD 400 graphics processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM and 32GB of storage. Other features include an HDMI slot, Gigabit Ethernet, two USB 2.0 ports, a USB 3.0 port, a camera interface and an eDP (embedded DisplayPort) slot to connect a display. It also has a 40-pin GPIO (general purpose input-output) slot to hook up add-on boards that may have sensors or other components.

The software that runs the kit is Ubuntu Linux but will also support Windows 10 and other versions of Windows.
The Aero Platform is a "ready-to-fly developer platform" with an Intel Atom x7-Z8700 processor, DDR3L RAM and flash storage, and it will run a version of embedded Linux. It will ship in the second half of this year, although we are not sure how much it will cost.

There are other kits out there. Nvidia's Jetson TX1 development board is already popular amongst those building their own drones. There is also Qualcomm's DragonBoard 410c, which supports Windows 10 IoT Core, embedded Linux and ROS (Robotics Operating System), the most widely used robotics OS.