4th of June 2019 - Amazon re:MARS 2019  - Las Vegas - UP Bridge The Gap, a brand belonging to a professional embedded computing ODM AAEON Technology Europe, is proud to announce its UP Squared RoboMaker Developer Kit for AWS RoboMaker powered by Intel® AI technology and Amazon Web Services (AWS). This effort is a clear direction from AWS, AAEON, and Intel to unlock the potential of artificial intelligence and opening a world of new possibilities for developer experiences. At Amazon re:MARS 2019, the UP team showcased how to use this kit to quickly and easily build a robot, with the ability to upgrade to an automated guided vehicle (AGV) and autonomous mobile robot (AMR). The kit is now available for pre-order at the UP shop and will be ready to ship by the end of June.  

 

The UP Squared RoboMaker Developer Kit for AWS RoboMaker is a starter package designed to be a fast and easy way for developers to add artificial intelligence (AI) and vision into their robots. The kit provides a clear tutorial for how to build hardware from the module level and how to use cloud services to shorten the development time. Developers have been able to add machine vision into their robots within a single day and working robotics demos in just a few days. With expertise from Intel, AWS and AAEON, this kit aims at providing developers a path from prototype to field deployment.

 

There are several modules included in this kit to enable true AI at the edge such as vision, inference, navigation and compute are all performed locally: This kit features an UP Squared board with an Intel® Atom™ processor x7-E3950, Intel® RealSense™ D435i camera and an Intel® Movidius™ Myriad™ X VPU. There is no other robotics developer kit on the market that is as well integrated: with CPU, integrated GPU, VPU and 3D Vision all integrated in a platform from a single manufacturer. The kit has been designed for and it is fully compatible to AWS RoboMaker, to extend the open-source robotics software framework, Robot Operating System (ROS), with connectivity to cloud services.

 

"The UP Squared RoboMaker Developer Kit is the first robotics kit in production which bridges the gap between the virtual testing environment and the field. The deep integration of the hardware with Amazon RoboMaker delivers an unprecedented experience to the developer speeding up the time to production" said Fabrizio Del Maffeo, VP of AAEON Technology.

 

"Artificial intelligence (AI) is opening a new world of possibilities in every industry, from predicting equipment failures to personalizing customer experiences to diagnosing and healing health problems faster," said Christine Boles, VP, IoT Group and GM, Industrial Solutions Division, at Intel. "Intel's collaboration with Amazon Web Services and AAEON has resulted in a kit in which all of the components and software are designed to work together making it easy for customers to incorporate AI and machine vision into their robotic system."

 

"We are excited to be collaborating with AAEON and Intel to enable developers easily build, simulate, test and deploy intelligent robotic applications using AWS RoboMaker," said Roger Barga, general manager of AWS Robotics and Automation Services, Amazon Web Services, Inc. " Aaeon's UP Squared RoboMaker development kit powered by Intel and AWS RoboMaker, give robotic developers a complete scalable, commercial-grade hardware platform combined with the power of the cloud to accelerate innovation."

 

At Amazon re:MARS 2019, Cogniteam, a company focused on autonomy, showcased its latest UGV-Lynx. Lynx is built on top of the UP Squared Developer Kit for AWS RoboMaker.  Dr. Yehuda Elmaliah, CEO of Cogniteam said, "The UP Squared Development Kit includes vision compute hardware on board. This enables us to free our CPU for decision making while processing data and building the world model of the robot in an optimized manner, by having production ready boards integrated with Intel® Movidius™ Myriad™ X VPU and a depth camera enables to jump from low-level control of the robot to a fully autonomous robot with cloud connectivity within days."

 

Because all robots are not built the same, the package doesn't include components which might change in different type of robots, such as the control board, motor, and wheels. However, the UP team provides links to schematics of a control board, 3D printing files, and accessories to users who would like to build an autonomous robot as the showcase example.

 

The UP team takes this as a starting point for its footprint in the robotics market and is expanding its robotic solutions to be used in logistics, rescue, safety, manufacturing, and exploration. The collaboration with Intel and AWS is an effective way to bring robotic solutions to new markets, and the UP team is ready to work with robotic makers to bring robots to the next level.