Hardware

Onboard Compute

Onboard compute is the processing hardware carried on the robot itself, running perception, state estimation, planning, and policy inference locally rather than on remote servers. Typical choices range from embedded systems-on-chip like the NVIDIA Jetson family to full GPUs on larger platforms, constrained by power draw, heat dissipation, and weight. It contrasts with off-board or cloud compute reached over a network.

Why it matters for physical AI

Model size, control frequency, and autonomy all bottleneck on the watts and FLOPS available onboard, driving quantization, distillation, and hierarchical designs that keep large models off the critical control path.