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VIA's Pico-ITX Drives Robotics

Written by Stew

Thursday, 21 August 2008

VIA is attending this year's Taipei International Robots Show. From today until Sunday you can see first hand how VIA's ultra compact boards, including, most notably, VIA EPIA Pico-ITX boards like the VIA EPIA P700, are becoming the must-have component for robotics enthusiasts everywhere.

Most hobbyist robots are fairly small, certainly not the size of the Asimo from Honda or the VIA EPIA Mini-ITX-based BEAR from Vecna, and while size is a very important consideration, the platform architecture itself is also very important. That's where products like VIA's EPIA Pico-ITX boards have the edge. Not only are they super compact (a mere 10cm x 7.2cm), use very power and produce very little heat, but they are also x86 based.

The advantages of using the x86 architecture are that robotics developers can write and compile software much more easily and also take advantage of decades of software expertise and programming languages that have become mature. Today's robots, at all levels, are more sophisticated and realistic than ever before and that's largely due to software. The intelligence that developers seek to imbue in their creations comes from software, and when it comes to writing software, x86 is where it at.

This is a video that we've put together, showing a few VIA EPIA-based robots strutting their stuff.

Enjoy.