Intel’s Candy Bar-Sized Euclid RealSense PC And Joule Devkit Empower Our Robot Overlords

One of the more interesting products announced this morning was Euclid, which manages to incorporate a fully self-contained PC into a device that is the size of a candy bar and runs Ubuntu Linux and Robot OS. Euclid even has its own internal battery, which allows it to function on its own without a tether.

Onboard is one of Intel’s RealSense cameras, which Krzanich says “brings sensors to robots.” Playing up on the statement, Euclid was installed into a small robot that took the stage at IDF. The robot had been preprogrammed to use its RealSense camera to follow someone around; sort of like your own miniature paparazzi, only less annoying.

Speaking of RealSense, Intel also announced the RealSense 400 camera and sensor — the company’s smallest module yet, thanks to an ultra-thin PCB design. Despite its small stature, Intel was able to double the 3D points that are captured per second, while the operating range has also been double compared to its predecessor.

But Intel didn’t stop there; the company pulled the wraps off the Joule maker board, which is being targeted at IoT developers and entrepreneurs that want to get their hands dirty when it comes to incorporating RealSense technology into new concepts, and eventually new products. Intel says that Joule “enables people to take a concept into a prototype and then into production at a fraction of the time and development cost.”

The low-power package uses a system-on-module (SOM), onboard RealSense camera and is perfectly cable of being used in computer vision, robotics, and drone applications. Intel is marketing two versions of Joule: the 550x and the 570x. The former includes a 1.5GHz quad-core Atom processor, 3GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. The latter throws in a 1.7GHz Atom processor and ups RAM and storage to 4GB and 16GB respectively. You’ll also find 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Intel graphics onboard, while Linux is running the show.

We also wouldn’t be too surprised to see students taking advantage of Joule to come up with their own creations in the near future.

And last, but not least, Intel had a fun demo on stage for Curie. There was one person playing piano with gloves that had embedded Curie sensors, a virtual drum kit/drummer, and two additional “band members” scratching a mixing board powered by NUC. The resulting digital music (and admittedly cool) geek fest can be seen in the video embedded earlier in this post.