Artificial intelligence startup eYs3D Microelectronics Co. is bringing computer vision-based image processing capabilities to all manner of autonomous robotic applications and smart city devices with the launch of its new development platform today.

Announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, eYs3D’s computer vision development platform is called XINK, and is both a platform-as-a-service and a hardware and software development kit. It’s aimed at providing a more cost-effective solution for developers looking to equip robots used in industrial, retail and agricultural industries with field analysis, object recognition, tracking and following, obstacle detection, and route planning capabilities.

The startup explains that the modular XINK platform comes with everything a developer needs to add such capabilities to their robots, with high-performance compute power, an AI accelerator, input/output controls, flexible communications peripherals, smart power management capabilities and machine vision subsystems. It can easily be integrated with most robots, and is designed to handle all of the low-level programming tasks relating to computer vision, with developers able to use cut-and-paste programming for application-specific designs, thereby saving time on coding, the company said.

XINK’s processing power comes from eYs3D’s customized new eCV1 AI chip, which has four core Arm 64-bit central processing units and a 4.6-teraflops neural processor unit that enables it to crunch its way through masses of data. There’s also an additional Arm Cortex M4 processor onboard that’s able to be used as a microcontroller. Multiple AI inference frameworks are supported, including TensorFlow, TensorFlow Lite, PyTorch, Caffe and others.

Its video capabilities are impressive too, with XINK supporting H.264 compression for video streaming, in addition to Imaging Signal Processing. It can accept image data from both external ISPs, or from the ISP software code that’s integrated with the XINK CPU.

The company said it’s expecting a lot of interest in its platform, citing data from Grand View Research that shows the global autonomous robot market will grow to $10.66 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 16.88% from 2022.

“New technologies have enabled surging market growth for mobile robotics,” said eYs3D Chief Strategy Officer James Wong. “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.”

The XINK computer vision development platform will be exhibited at CES 2023 Jan. 5-8.

Image: eYs3D