Qualcomm Technologies, a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, has announced its Qualcomm Robotics RB3 Platform – the company’s first integrated, comprehensive offering designed specifically for robotics.
Building on Qualcomm Technologies’ success in robotics and drone products available today, this purpose-built platform features a highly optimised set of hardware, software and tools designed to help manufacturers and developers create the next generation of advanced consumer, enterprise and industrial robotics products. Based on the Qualcomm SDA/SDM845 system-on-chip (SoC), the platform integrates key capabilities such as high-performance heterogeneous computing, 4G/LTE connectivity including CBRS support for private LTE networks, a Qualcomm AI Engine for on-device Machine Learning and computer vision, hi-fidelity sensor processing for perception, odometry for localisation, mapping and navigation, vault-like security and Wi-Fi connectivity. The Qualcomm Robotics RB3 Platform also plans to introduce 5G connectivity support later this year to further enable low-latency and high-throughput industrial robotics applications.
“Our technologies are at the heart of a wide array of robotics products available today, from companion robots including Anki Vector, Elli Q and Sony Aibo, to multimedia robots like Cerevo Tripon and Keecker, to labour-saving machines such as robotic vacuum cleaners from iRobot, Ecovacs and Panasonic,” said Dev Singh, Director of Business Development and Head of Autonomous Robotics, Drones and Intelligent Machines at Qualcomm Technologies. “With the Qualcomm Robotics RB3 Platform, we aim to bring our cutting-edge AI, edge compute and connectivity technologies into the hands of many more robotics innovators to help spur the fast development and commercialisation of a new generation of useful and intelligent robots in agriculture, consumer, delivery, inspection, service, smart manufacturing/Industry 4.0, warehousing and logistics and other applications.”
The Qualcomm Robotics RB3 Platform is designed to allow for flexible design options for development and commercialisation, from development board offerings for prototyping, to off-the-shelf system-on-module solutions for faster commercialisation, to the flexibility for chip-on-board designs for cost optimisation at scale. The platform currently supports Linux and Robot Operating System (ROS), while also including support for the Qualcomm Neural Processing software development kit (SDK) for advanced on-device AI, the Qualcomm Computer Vision Suite, the Qualcomm Hexagon DSP SDK, and Amazon’s AWS RoboMaker, with plans for Ubuntu Linux support.
The platform’s hardware development kit contains the new purpose-built robotics-focused DragonBoard 845c development board, based on the Qualcomm SDA/SDM845 SoC and compliant with the 96Boards open hardware specification to support a broad range of mezzanine-board expansions. Optional elements for the kit include a connectivity board; an image camera for superb hi-res photo, 4K video capture and AI-assisted detection and recognition of people and objects; a tracking camera for path planning and obstacle avoidance using visual simultaneous localisation and mapping (vSLAM); a stereo camera for navigation; and a time-of-flight camera for people, gesture and object detection even in low light conditions.
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