Semiconductor maker Qualcomm Inc. has been busy working on specialized chips for artificial intelligence workloads, but unlike rival chipmakers Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp., it’s focusing more on smaller devices and connectivity.

That’s the case with the company’s latest RB5 AI-enabled 5G robotics platform, which is designed to be used by a variety of robots and drones. The company said the chips could be used by manufacturers to build fully autonomous robots that can navigate their environments by themselves while quickly sending data back to users.

The RB5 robotics platform is the successor to Qualcomm’s RB3 chipset, and includes both hardware, software and development tools for manufacturers to create “the next generation of high-compute, low-power robots and drones,” Qualcomm said.

On the hardware side, the platform runs Qualcomm’s new QRB5165 central processing unit, together with its Kryo 585 CPU and Adreno 650 graphics processing unit, which is based on the Snapdragon 865 CPU. The hardware has been customized specially for robotics applications and can deliver up to 15 tera operations per second of AI performance, the company said. The platform also supports both 4G and 5G connectivity across a variety of bandwidths, including mmWave.

Qualcomm said the chipset is geared toward machine vision, and to enable that, it can process both 4K and 8K HDR video and 200-megapixel images, with as many as seven cameras working at once. The package also includes a software development kit for machine vision, neural processing, localization, feature recognition and obstacle detection.

Meanwhile, the robotics development kit is packed with tons of hardware to get developers going, including a 12-megapixel main camera, plus other cameras for tracking, depth and time-of-flight. It also comes with magnetic, pressure, temperature and ultrasonic sensors. In addition, Qualcomm boasts of “vaultlike security.”

Qualcomm said the RB5 robotics platform can be used to power devices ranging from toys to vacuum cleaners and even lawn mowers, though the main use it envisions is industrial and commercial applications. One of the most important use cases appears to be drones.

“[The RB5] platform will enable new autonomous drone experiences, such as navigating quickly through tight spaces while mapping the environment for objects of interest,” said Chad Sweet, chief executive officer of drone maker ModelAI.

Qualcomm is targeting a rapidly growing robotics industry. ABI Research estimates that some 60 million robots will be deployed in 2020 alone, doubling by 2025. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an acceleration of robotic deployments in commercial markets such as healthcare and delivery.

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