Qualcomm announced a robotics reference design to help designers attach multiple different sensors to a robot without the need for an added sensor connection board.
CEO Cristiano Amon unveiled the new Dragonwing IQ10 Robotics Reference Design in a keynote at Computex in Taiwan on Monday.
“It’s going to be different from what’s on the market …for a very large sensor ecosystem,” said Sidharth Agarwaal, director of product management, in a briefing with reporters prior to the CEO announcement. “It’s designed so you can hook up sensors without an an additional piece of hardware. Others out there require you to purchase another sensors board, but ours is all in one, so it’s all you need to create robotics apps. Deployment is easier…”
The new RRD connects to optical sensors in robotic cameras using the industry-ready GSML2 protocol for high definition video, he said. Connections to lidar are via Ethernet and IMUs have a host connection with the IQ10 SoC. Pricing for the IQ10 RRD hardware was not announced, but it will be available to early access customers sometime in June, Qualcomm said.
Qualcomm has benefited with a decade of experience in automotive electronics in making the RRD device, Agarwaal said. “We can leverage from auto all the perception and SoC and temperature and safety concepts we were leveraging for a decade for auto and we’re using that to it further for robots,” Agarwaal said.
Various robot reference designs are already on the market, some from leading manufacturers. They include humanoid robot guidelines from STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments. TI’s product has a reference design for sensor modules in time of flight, lidar and millimeter wave sensing while ST supports MEMS sensor designs and motor control and power management for robot body sensing.
Tesla Optimus Gen 2 and 1X NEO are being developed with modular, AI-drive architectures that can serve as design blueprints for future reference systems. Qualcomm also already makes an RB5 Autonomous Robotics Reference Design platform for perception with stereo cameras, a tracking image sensors, and near-360-degree ultrasonic coverage.
The new Qualcomm IQ10 RRD supports 18 Qualcomm Oryon CPU nodes and 16 x 16 LPDDR5 memory. It also integrates Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
Last week prior to Computex, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon C platform for laptops for what Qualcomm calls the “budget conscious” PC buyer. Several PC makers are expected to support the C platform.