Real-time robot controller delivers AI robotics at the edge
Scalable development of AI-based robotics applications can be achieved with the ROScube-I, a real-time ROS 2 robot controller developed by Adlink Technology with Intel. It combines I/O connectivity with the ROS 2 software.
The Adlink ROScube-I series is a ROS 2-enabled robotic controller based on Intel Xeon E, 9th Gen Intel CoreTM i7/i3 and 8th Gen Intel Core i5 processors. I/O connectivity supports a variety of sensors and actuators for robotic applications. The ROScube-I supports an extension box for convenient functional and performance expansion with Intel VPU cards and the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit for computation of AI algorithms and inference.
Robotic systems based on the ROScube-I are supported by Adlink’s Neuron software development kit (SDK), the proprietary platform specifically designed for professional robotic applications such as autonomous mobile robots (AMR).
The ROScube-I series features high-performance x86-64 mainstream architecture for ROS 2 development, I/O for a wide range of devices and real-time I/O for environmental sensors (e.g.CAN, GPIO, COM). There is real-time middleware for communication between software components and devices and a hypervisor for safe, mission-critical operation execution. There is also ruggedised, secure connectivity with locking USB ports.
The robotic controller can use an optional RTOS such as VxWorks.
Developers can easily use the ROScube-I starter kit or ROScube Pico development kit (powered by Intel Core, Celeron and Atom processors) to rapidly prototype algorithms and immediately deploy them to Adlink’s NeuronBot ROS 2-based rapid robotic development kit for demonstration. This allows for fast improvement of AI models and acquisition of vision data to optimise operational decision-making, explains Adlink. The NeuronBot also supports Adlink’s Neuron SDK to leverage the powerful open source ROS libraries and packages.
The ROScube-I starter kit has an embedded board with a rich I/O interface, an MXM graphics module support for accelerated AI computing and compatibility with ROS/ROS 2 and support for OpenVINO.
The ROScube Pico development kit is compatible with Raspberry Pi 40-pin general purpose I/O (GPIO), rich ROS open source applications and is a compact size based on the SMARC form factor.
According to René Torres, vice president of the sales, marketing and communications group and general manager of industrial solution sales at Intel: “Powered with technologies such as Intel Architecture, Intel Iris Graphics, Movidius and OpenVINO the ROScube will enable new levels of performance and collaboration between multiple AMRs with real-time communication”.
