Qualcomm is a leader in the smartphone world. Now the firm is making a bid for dominance in automotive and robotics products, VentureBeat reports.
The outlet reports that Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon Automotive 4G and Automotive 5G platforms at MWC Barcelona 19 (formerly known as Mobile World Congress). The platforms include support for C-V2X, connected car technology that lets vehicles communicate with one another, in addition to other nearby connected devices. Qualcomm also debuted the QCA6696, a chip with built-in support for Wi-Fi 6 that can power in-car infotainment systems.
Qualcomm plans to sample its new automotive offerings later this year and make these products available for production vehicles in 2021 as part of the company’s upcoming second-generation connected car reference design, says the outlet.
The Robotics RB3 platform marks the firm’s first integrated offering and at its center is Qualcomm’s powerful Snapdragon 845 system-on-chip (10nm process) as well as its on-device AI Engine. The platform supports Linux and Robot Operating System (ROS) and Amazon’s AWS RoboMaker.
“We are delighted to be working with Qualcomm Technologies to help developers easily build intelligent robotics functions using AWS cloud services and then deploy their application onto a commercial grade, scalable hardware platform,” said Roger Barga, GM of AWS Robotics and Automation Services, Amazon Web Services, Inc, in a statement. “Our collaboration is designed to give robotics developers a complete cloud-to-the-edge solution, accelerating development, providing intelligence out of the box, and easing robotic lifecycle management.”
“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 commercialization 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.”
Qualcomm envisions this platform for use in consumer-facing devices in addition to enterprise and industrial applications, reports ZDNet.
“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 commercialization 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,” Dev Singh, head of autonomous robotics, drones and intelligent machines at Qualcomm, said in a statement.