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Texas Instruments The Future of Robotics | 3 Foreword As robots are more and more commonplace in factories, it is important that they become more intelligent, autonomous, safer, and efficient. This is enabled with precise motor control, differentiated sensing technologies, and processing at the edge, all with robust real-time communication. Modern robotics systems need to have low latency, high speed, and deterministic communication interfaces to respond to changing environments quickly. This enables the robots to have excellent movement capabilities with high precision. A second aspect of high-performance communication is the need to ensure worker safety. To do this quickly, responding safety subsystems are needed to enable seamless collaboration between robot and worker. Seamless collaboration and safety can only be enabled when different sensors are used in the robot. This is because sensors can scan the surrounding environment and stop (in the case of an industrial robot) or reduce (in the case of an autonomous mobile robot (AMR)) a robot's speed when humans approach or any other obstacle is in the robot path. These sensing capabilities can be implemented with LIDAR, RADAR, ultrasonic sensors, or 3D cameras. All of these sensors generate increasingly massive volumes of highly varied data that need to be fused and processed in real time to help the robot make real-time decisions, navigating in dynamic real- world environments, and finally becoming autonomous. TI offers various technologies that enable modern robotic systems ranging from TI mmWave sensors for detecting obstacles around the robot to Sitara™ processors running AI at the edge with multiple high-speed peripherals that enhance the designs of robots. This e-book will go through all these different TI's technologies suited for robot-system building blocks. ■ Giovanni Campanella, System Manager, Texas Instruments The Future of Robotics Giovanni Campanella, System Manager, Texas Instruments