1.5 Choosing brain of robots
After going through the details about microcontrollers, SBC, mini-PC, and workstation, you may get an idea which computing platform has to choose for your robot. From my experience, I can give my choice of computing units for different kinds of robots.
1.5.1 Industrial Robots
1.5.1.1 Industrial robotic arm: PLC/SCADA, mini-PC, custom-designed controllers.
1.5.1.2 Collaborative Robots (Cobots): custom-designed controllers
1.5.1.3 Warehouse mobile Robots: microcontrollers with SBC, only using SBC, mini-PC
1.5.2 Consumer Robots
1.5.2.1 Robotic vacuum cleaner: Microcontrollers.
1.5.3 Drones
In drones, the computing units should not weigh much, so in most of the drones, they use microcontrollers and SBC for extra processing.
1.5.4 Medical Robots:
1.5.4.1 Surgical Robots: Custom designed mini-computers
1.5.4.2 Prosthetic arm: microcontrollers
1.5.5 Entertainment Robots:
1.5.5.1 Social robots: SBC, mini-computers
1.5.6 Education Robots:
1.5.6.1 Mobile robots: microcontrollers, SBC, mini-PC depends on computation requirements.
1.5.6.2 Robotic arm: microcontroller, SBC, mini-PC depends on computation.
1.5.7 Research robots:
1.5.7.1 Mobile robots: microcontrollers, SBC, mini-PC
1.5.7.2 Robotic arm: SBC, mini-PC, workstations, PLC
1.5.8 Military & Security robots:
1.5.8.1 Military Robots: military-grade microcontrollers, mini-PC, SBC
1.5.8.2 Security mobile robots: mini-PC, workstations
1.5.9 Telepresence robots:
Mobile base: microcontrollers, SBC
1.5.10 Underwater robots:
1.5.10.1 Underwater drones: microcontrollers, SBC
1.5.11 Humanoid Robot:
1.5.11.1 Toy sized Humanoid: microcontrollers
1.5.11.2 Full-sized humanoid: mini-PC, high-end SBC
