Drones may still have some legal hurdles to fly over before they truly arrive, but as a consumer technology, they’ve shown remarkable progress. We’ve gone form bulky, difficult-to-control monstrosities to tiny Millennium Falcon replicas in the span of a few short years.

Now, with a little help from Qualcomm, they’re about to get even better. The chipmaker –- whose Snapdragon mobile processors power many of the world’s top smartphones –- has unveiled a new class of chip crafted specifically for drones, aptly called Snapdragon Flight.

For many drones, its control system can be a hodgepodge of off-the-shelf parts: a CPU for navigation, an image processor for whatever camera is onboard, and more silicon for things like GPS and wireless connectivity. But having multiple components do different things can tax power efficiency, not to mention make the drone physically larger (and thus harder to fly).

Qualcomm saw an opportunity to make things better, since it’s been working on combining functionality in smartphone chips for years. For Snapdragon Flight, the company is more or less repurposing the same Snapdragon 800 system-on-a-chip (SoC) processors for drones, since it’s already done the heavy lifting of integrating a CPU with GPS, wireless connectivity, image processing and more on smartphones.

“If you take one of our Snapdragon processors, it pretty much does everything,” says Raj Talluri, Qualcomm’s senior vice president of product management for IoE (Internet of Everything). “It flies, it takes 4K video — it does all the things that high-end $1,000 drones do, except you do it with one processor. It’s a huge advantage.”

One of the main areas of improvement in drones is flight time, he explains.

“We’ve integrated so many things in one chipset, it reduces the weight of the drone significantly. Which means you can reduce the size of the motors, fans and battery. And it flies higher and longer.”

The Qualcomm Flight processor could lead to drones with more features, better battery life and lower cost. Image: Mashable, Jhila Farzaneh

One of the big focuses for Qualcomm in its recent chips has been enabling phones to capture 4K video. This has obvious applications in consumer drones, which are primarily used to record photos and video from otherwise unobtainable perspectives.

“Drones just started doing 4K recently,” Talluri says. “We’ve been doing 4K for a long time. So when we bring this platform [to drones], suddenly you get this 4K capability into a smaller, lighter consumer drone.”

In video, however, drones present a unique challenge separate from smartphones. Not only do users want to capture 4K footage, but they want to see live video from the drone’s camera at the same time. Talluri says Flight was created with applications like this in mind, and other abilities — like, say, obstacle avoidance in the navigation system — can be added with software updates from the drone manufacturer.

That depends on companies adopting Snapdragon Flight, of course, but if Qualcomm’s claims are true, they have good reason to do so. Talluri estimates that once drone makers start using it, the chips will let them make extremely capable drones that cost between $200 to $300.

“We’ve put so many of the moving parts on one platform. It will bring this class of drones — these flying cameras into a much more affordable range.”

And potentially make them much more ubiquitous in future skies.