How BlackBerry & AMD are Transforming the Robotics Industry

From enhancing warehouse operations to helping businesses cook the perfect pizza, the use of industrial robots has become an essential part of modern production processes. 

Capable of performing tasks that are repetitive, dangerous, or require a high degree of precision, almost three million industrial robots are working in factories around the world, handling tedious, expensive, time-consuming, dirty, dull and dangerous jobs so that human workers can take on more valuable and rewarding tasks.

Given the high-stakes environment of industrial applications, where efficiency, safety and precision are paramount, increasing the performance of industrial robotics systems is key to increased efficiency and productivity. 

BlackBerry and AMD enhancing robotics performance in industrial and healthcare environments

In industrial settings, time is directly proportional to productivity. Lower latency ensures that robotic systems can respond and perform tasks more quickly. This speed is vital for maintaining high throughput in manufacturing lines, assembly tasks and other automated processes. Faster response times can significantly enhance the overall efficiency of production lines, leading to higher output and improved operational performance.

With this in mind, security software and services company BlackBerry has announced a collaboration with AMD designed to revolutionise next-generation robotic systems by enabling new levels of low latency and jitter – variability or inconsistency in the latency between the issuance of a command and the action taken by a robotic system – and repeatable determinism. 

Together, the companies will address the critical need for ‘hard’ real-time capabilities in robotics-focused hardware with an affordable and powerful platform that delivers enhanced performance, reliability, and scalability for robotic systems in industrial and healthcare.

BlackBerry’s newly separate IoT Division, QNX, is already working under the hood in 235 million cars worldwide and have been developing world-class real-time operating systems since the 1980s. This combination of QNX's expertise in real-time foundational software solutions and software development platform with AMD's Kria out-of-the-box System-on-Modules hardware, the companies say, enables sensor fusion, high-performance data processing, real-time control, industrial networking and reduced latency in robotic applications. Additionally, customers can benefit from seamless integration and optimisation of software and hardware components, resulting in streamlined development processes and accelerated time-to-market for innovative robotic solutions.

“Combining the industry-leading strengths of AMD and QNX will provide a foundation platform that opens new doors for innovation and takes the future of robotics technology well beyond the constraints experienced until now,” says Chetan Khona, Senior Director of Industrial, Vision, Healthcare and Sciences Markets at AMD.

“An integrated solution by BlackBerry QNX through our collaboration with AMD will provide an integrated software-hardware foundation offering real-time performance, low latency and determinism, to ensure that critical robotic tasks are executed with the same level of precision and responsiveness every single time,” adds Grant Courville, VP Product & Strategy at BlackBerry QNX. “These are crucial attributes for industries carrying out finely tuned operations, such as the fast-growing industries of autonomous mobile robots and surgical robotics. Together with AMD, we are committed to driving technological advancements that address some of these most complex challenges and transform the future of the robotics industry.”

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