How to choose a brain for your robot?

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

Lentin Joseph

View posts by Lentin Joseph
Roboticist | Author of 8 robotics books | TEDx speaker

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