A rising number of industries struggling to retain workers as the labor shortage continues to grow. Adding to this, a number of jobs are tedious, repetitive, and dangerous while many of the jobseekers are in search of an improved work-life balance, flexibility, and improved wages. However, robotic solutions can be the viable alternative, bringing more safety, efficiency, accuracy, and precision by reducing human involvement in the process, while protecting human workers from hazardous environments. It is a revolutionary concept with far-reaching implications and has the potential to shape the future of entire industries.

As an embedded solutions company, TechNexion has been in development of products ideally suited for robotic applications for several years, including integrated System on Modules (SOMs), camera solutions, and embedded box computers.

TechNexion’s latest SOMs provide the compute horsepower needed for many robotic applications. The EDM-G-IMX8M-PLUS SOM integrates 4x ARM Cortex-A53 cores at up to 1.8GHz (1.6GHz at full industrial temp range), with a 2.3 TOPS Neural processing unit (NPU). It also can interface natively with two MIPI-CSI2 cameras, allowing for identification of objects and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) applications.

TechNexion’s upcoming ROVY SOM series are based on the TI Jacinto 7 series SOCs, which were originally designed for Automated Driver Assistance System (ADAS) applications. ROVY SOMs provide unprecedented levels of I/O with a powerful compute complex with built-in ML acceleration, as well as an isolated MCU subsystem designed to implement functional safety systems. ROVY SOMs provide stability, efficiency and forward-compatibilities for robotic integration, drastically lowering system complexity, equipping with efficient vision and AI processing, functional safety certifiable, enabling robots to drive greater performance.

Many robotic applications rely on vision-based solutions for autonomous operation. TechNexion’s many camera solutions can fit the bill here as well. MIPI-CSI2 cameras (TEVI series) offer the highest performance and lowest camera latency, but require short connection to the SOM or SOC, and software integration can be more challenging. TechNexion also offers USB3 cameras (VizionCam series) and our VizionLink camera series offers an extended connection for MIPI-CSI2 cameras up to 15m from the host processor.

For robotic applications requiring the highest levels of embedded computing performance, TechNexion offers the TEK8021-NX-V embedded computer. Integrating the latest NVIDIA NX-series system on modules, this embedded computer is capable of capturing and processing video from up to 24 cameras simultaneously.