One-Stop XINK Development Platform for Vision-Equipped Robots
eYs3D has announced its plan to introduce at CES a state-of-the-art computer vision development platform for next-generation autonomous robotic applications such as AIoT (artificial intelligence of things), smart city, indoor cleaning robots, and outdoor agricultural robots for both industrial and retail sectors.
The platform, called XINK, is both a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) as well as a hardware and software development kit that is a cost-effective solution for design of safe, vision-capable mobile AI products equipped with field analysis, object recognition, obstacle detection, object tracking and following, and route planning functions.
XINK provides all the necessary elements for product development, including high-performance compute power, AI accelerator, I/O controls and Flexi-bus communication peripherals, smart power management and machine vision subsystems. The modular XINK platform takes care of low-level programming, freeing developers to use cut-and-paste coding for application-specific design while reducing design cycles for quicker commercialization.
The platform has H.264 compression for video streaming as well as Imaging Signal Processing (ISP) support features. XINK accepts image data from either an external ISP such as eYs3D’s separate eSP87x series stereo video and depth processor, or from the ISP soft code inside the XINK CPU.
The edge AI processing is powered by eYs3D’s new eCV1 AI chip that incorporates four Core ARM 64-Bit CPUs and a 4.6 TOPS neural processor unit (NPU). An additional low power ARM Cortex M4 processor can be used as an MCU. The platform supports various AI inference tools including TensorFlow, TensorFlow Lite, PyTorch, Caffe, TVM and more.
According to Grand View Research the global autonomous robot market size is expected to reach $10.66 billion by 2030, a CAGR of 16.8% from 2022, in part due to expansion in materials handling needs.
“New technologies have enabled surging market growth for mobile robotics,” said James Wang, chief strategy officer of eYs3D. “Mobile autonomy must be accompanied by advances in computer vision to enable new areas of robotic deployment, including accurate picking and packing; moving, sorting and efficiently storing items; autonomous navigation; and other markets. Our XINK platform will allow rapid, one-stop development of vision capabilities for these applications, and we expect to host a community of developers who will both provide and benefit from contributed building blocks.”
