Can you please share a little bit about yourself with our visitors? 

My name is Mark Turner, I am the Sales Director for ADLINK Technology here in the UK.

ADLINK Technology is a global leader in Edge AI & Embedded Computing technology and solutions. Head quartered in Taiwan, we employ circa 2000 people globally, have 16 different nationalities across over 30 offices around the world. We are a technology leader with over 30% of our workforce in engineering and product development functions.

With over 25 years’ experience, we lead and actively participate in industry standards committees to help drive innovation through product development. Technology changes at a very rapid pace these days, therefore it is increasingly more important than ever for companies like us to drive innovation through standards, that way customers can benefit from the very latest technologies available through industry adopted standards. For example, as an active member of the ROS 2 Technical Steering Committee, ADLINK helps to steer the technical direction with Open Robotics. Our contributions are focused on ROS middleware improvements for flexibility and performance, which in turn provide real benefit to the ROS community.

Our corporate vision is to be a catalyst for industry empowered by AI – Artificial Intelligence. We do this by combining our hardware experience and expertise with our intelligent middleware - software solutions. By combining these two capabilities ADLINK makes it easier for developers to adopt new technologies faster, improve efficiency and break new boundaries in applying technology to challenging applications and use cases.

Can you please tell us why you chose to exhibit at Robotics & Automation 2021?

Demand for AI, Autonomy and more intelligent edge solutions; like industry 4.0 and Robotics has rapidly increased, in part, due to recent global circumstances. Even prior to these global events ADLINK was pioneering new solutions for edge AI, Robotics and Autonomous solutions, our technology can drive real improvements in efficiency and decision making at the edge. Why is this important? More and more processing and determinism is now required and achieved at the edge or closer to the process itself – this enables faster decision making, improved process efficiency and the ability to adapt to changing or challenging conditions.

The reason we chose Robotics & Automation? ADLINK Technology has a wealth of experience in Robotics and Automation, we are a key contributor to the eco systems surrounding these industries and it is a great opportunity to share this experience with the Robotics and Automation 2021 audience. Being the largest Robotics & Automation show in the UK it was an easy decision to show case ourselves here and we are very much looking forward to meeting new and existing customers during the two day show.

What will you be sharing with visitors at the exhibition?

2021 is an important milestone in the development of our Robotics, Edge AI and Autonomous solutions, we are here to highlight what we have been working on in recent months.  This includes our latest edition to our ROSCube product family – The newly released “PICO” solutions are available with Intel 11th Generation Core I series processing cores, iRIS Xe graphics and support for Intel OpenVINO & ROS/ROS2, this one is called the ROSCube PICO TGL.  We are also launching our new ROSCube PICO NPN supporting NVIDIA Jetson Nano and NVIDIA Xavier NX with support for ROS/ROS2 and NVIDIA Jetpack. These two new solutions will form the main robot controller for AGV’s, AMR’s as well as other mobile robotics applications.

Alongside these two new product launches will be various new platforms based on the latest technologies available from the likes of Intel, NVIDIA, ARM, NXP and AMD. We will also have live demos of our AI visions solutions, our range of industry standard building blocks plus a working Neuron Bot featuring our Neuron SDK.

You mentioned Neuron SDK, what is it and how can it help companies with robotics development?

ADLINK Technology’s Neuron SDK builds upon ROS - Robotics Operating System. ROS 1 has been around since 2010 and provides fundamental building blocks for developers so they don’t need to reinvent wheels, i.e. sensor fusion, navigation, motion planning and visualisation. Although ROS has a great history, ROS 1 does have inherent boundaries, it always assumes a perfect communication path and was traditionally used for a single robot use case. In recent years we have seen demand for intelligent and deterministic use cases, that require more than one mobile robot working in parallel or combination with other robots. The introduction of ROS2 caters for these use cases.

ADLINK has contributed its Cyclone DDS to ROS2, which provides things like, real time capability, fault tolerance – Quality of service/auto recovery and increased reliability, the newest Galactic version of ROS 2 now has ADLINK Eclipse Cyclone DDS as the default middleware and is necessary for robotics use cases requiring real time operation, swarm autonomy, decentralised communication and improve stability and security.

Our Neuron SDK development platform offers 4 fundamentals.

• Neuro IDE – Development environment for compiling and editing Robot applications
• Neuro APP – provides out of the box examples for verified open source packages for things like Navigation, SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping), Auto inspection
• Neuron COM - Cyclone DDS, Shared memory, ROS 2 Migration guides
• Neuron Library – Easy control of Inputs and Outputs (IO’s)

Our ROSCube solutions are pre-qualified with Neuron SDK, if you would like to learn more, we look forward to meeting you on Stand 322 at Robotics & Automation 2021. To arrange a meeting please contact me directly or via UK@adlinktech.com