Flexibility is Key
Vision and artificial intelligence (AI) are megatrends in automation, Industry 4.0 and cyber-virtual factories. Embedded computer technologies for such systems have to meet increasingly complex demands. What’s good enough today may be too little tomorrow – in terms of processor performance, cores, virtual machines or the number of onboard interfaces. With their high scalability, Computer-on-Modules can provide the necessary flexibility and, as convergent components, are even suitable for closed-loop engineering.
That AI based vision is an industrial market with a dynamic future becomes obvious when looking at a megatrend in a sector that’s gaining considerable ground commercially: the camera technology market for autonomous robotic vehicles. At 140%, it is growing significantly stronger than the market for autonomous vehicles at around 40%. It is therefore safe to assume that more than three times as many cameras will be installed per vehicle than before. The number will be even higher if the costs per camera fall. However, what won’t decrease is the amount of image data to be processed. On the contrary, it will increase significantly as more cameras and higher resolutions also promise safer situational awareness. Besides subsystems for data preprocessing, embedded computing cores and their GPGPUs are being used more and more for image recognition. This trend also affects industrial autonomous vehicles, as well as collaborative or cooperative stationary robotics and all other industrial vision systems.
