Operating heavy cargo drones above weather layers demands heavy onboard neural compute in freezing, thin air. This paper details thermal and computational stress tests of an airborne AI server flying at 45,000 feet.
In a vacuum chamber simulating 45,000 ft altitude (-56°C external air, 14 kPa ambient pressure), the server sustained 85 watts of GPU inference continuously with junction temperatures peaking at a comfortable 68°C.
The edge computer processed 1.2 million points per second from three 3D flash lidars, detecting power lines and thin guy wires at 800 meters distance in 14.2 milliseconds.