Any Robot, Any Radio, Any Application, Anytime…
We are thrilled to announce Vision2, our universal robotics controller. This has been over two years in the making as part of the DoD’s Soldier Robotic Controller (SRoC) program. It is intended not only for use with Vantage products, but also a wide range of other robots including drones, ground robots, and unmanned surface and underwater vehicles. Vision2 offers significant advances in performance, modularity, and value. You can see more specifics of what Vision2 can do here. What follows focuses on the “why” of this product and explains how our belief system and values influenced our design decisions for this product.
We believe in the value of community. We’ve had the privilege of becoming friends with many leaders in the robotics industry, which has given us an overwhelming feeling of awe and humility with the number of brilliant people working in this space. But we also all work on mind bendingly hard challenges and it’s clear that we can’t all do everything. For our industry to reach its potential and remain competitive on the world stage, we need to form a web of inter supporting members that reduces duplication of effort. Vision2 was built with that in mind. It is intended to be used by our competition and allies in the industry alike, with the intent of expanding what we all can achieve. Vision2 supports open standards like USB-C, Mavlink, RAS-A, RAS-G, and Android, software built by others (including ATAK, QGroundControl, Autodyne Nexus, and RAC2), radios modules built by others, and most importantly, the amazing robotic devices built by others. We intend it to be a platform for others to build upon and look forward to assisting our brilliant colleagues in this effort.
The mobile robotics industry is growing rapidly with immense value being created in diverse applications from agriculture to warfare and everything in between. This convinced us to invest for the long term and support a growing market with the value needed to reach more customers. Rather than taking the quick solution of wrapping sticks around an off the shelf tablet, as is often done, we built a mobile computer from the ground up from the right screen and processor. This was more expensive and harder, but it resulted in a higher performance and lower cost product. We are using this lower cost to enable a significantly lower price than what’s currently available with the goal of helping the robotics industry achieve that next level of growth without sacrificing performance.
We believe in listening to our customers and making sure every single design decision is in support of their values and needs. What we heard was the need for a screen that could be viewed in all conditions, stories of aching backs and arms holding heavy controllers, the need for tactile buttons that support gloved operation, frustration with touchscreens that went berserk in the rain, and concern with having drones return to the wrong location if they changed position during operation. We incorporated this into our design with a radically lightweight 625 g/ 1.4 lb controller with a 2500 nit outdoor viewable screen that is 4x brighter than available tablets, a rain tolerant touchscreen and single touch tactile touchscreen lock, 14 big tactile buttons, and onboard GPS for automatically updating the return to pilot location. The modular radio bay affords the opportunity to continue this evolution with cellular data links and new needs from users we haven’t met yet.
We believe that the future of AI is bright and will have impacts beyond our imagination. Based on this, we selected a processor for Vision2, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8250 processor, which offers 15 TOPS of AI crunching power for taking full advantage of the potential of AI on the edge for advanced autonomy, map creation, and no doubt countless great ideas we can’t imagine. Notably, it does this while sipping power, thanks to its cutting edge 7 nm processor scale.
Vijay Santhakumar, our VP of Hardware, led the challenge of translating this product vision into Vision2 over the last two years. His background as a key engineer and design leader for both the Motorola Razr and Motorola Xoom, the first Android tablet ever, gave him a crucial perspective on making a mobile computer that pushed state of the art on performance and could address the myriad challenges of making it work reliably in all conditions.
This effort shone as we completed the final rigorous testing for the SRoC program in early June with DoD in the hands of soldiers ready to dish out the obligatory level of abuse to ensure suitability for the DoD’s most demanding applications. We were thrilled to see the hard work pay off as Vision2 performed flawlessly to their exacting requirements.
Vision2 Beta units will be available in October 2023 to select customers and production units will ship in April 2024. We’d love to hear from you if Vision2 could be useful for your products and customers. You can reach our sales team to learn more at [email protected].
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