Renesas Wants to Power Your Next Smart Robotics Project with Its New RZ/V2H Robotic Development Kit

Renesas has announced a new development board, designed for those looking to get a quick-start on their next robotics project — the RZ/V2H-based Robotic Development Kit (RDK).

"The Robotic Development Kit (RDK) helps to accelerate high‑performance AI [Artificial Intelligence] vision and robotics designs using our Arm‑based RZ/V2H microprocessor (MPU)," Renesas explains of its single-board computer tailored for robotic control. "This kit is designed to tackle demanding AI image‑processing workloads with up to 80 TOPS [Tera-Operations Per Second] (sparse) AI inference performance, while still giving the flexibility to run multiple operating systems on a multi‑core CPU. By combining powerful AI acceleration with rich connectivity, we enable rapid prototyping, system bring‑up, and smooth integration into robotic platforms."

The heart of the board, brought to our attention by CNX Software, is the Renesas RZ/V2H, a system-on-chip with four Arm Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 1.8GHz, two Cortex-R8 cores running at up to 800MHz, and a single Cortex-M33 microcontroller core running at up to 200MHz. Alongside these is a DRP-AI3 coprocessor, designed for machine learning and computer vision workloads and delivering a claimed eight TOPS of dense compute or up to 80 TOPS for sparse workloads.

The board includes 16GB of LPDDR4 memory — likely to bump its price up considerably, given the current shortage of DDR4 and DDR5 memory components — and 64MB of quad-SPI flash and a bundled 64GB microSD card for software storage. There's a micro-HDMI port, two four-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface 2 (CSI-2) camera connections, a gigabit Ethernet port, two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, JTAG debugging, a PCI Express Gen. 3 flat flexible circuit (FFC) connector sharing the same pinout as the one on the Raspberry Pi 5, and an equally Raspberry Pi-mimicking 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, plus two CAN-FD bus connectors.

The RDK isn't just a quick-start platform for experimenting with the RZ/V2H, though: the company is providing board design files to use as a reference design for those looking to integrated the chip in a custom creation. Renesas has also demonstrated exactly the sort of project it envisions seeing the RDK used for, with a demo of a RZ/V2H drone — using the various cores for everything from flight control and power management to on-board real-time computer vision.

More information on the RDK is available on the Renesas website; at the time of writing the company had yet to confirm pricing and availability.