Software & Middleware
Real-Time Operating System (RTOS)
A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system that provides deterministic scheduling guarantees, ensuring high-priority tasks meet deadlines with bounded latency through preemptive priority scheduling, priority-inheritance locking, and minimal interrupt jitter. Examples include VxWorks, QNX, and FreeRTOS, while Linux with the PREEMPT_RT patches achieves soft-to-firm real-time performance and is widely used in robot controllers.
Why it matters for physical AI
Deterministic execution is the substrate beneath every stable high-rate control loop, and choosing between microcontroller RTOSes and real-time Linux shapes a robot's compute architecture and its integration of learned components.
Build physical AI
Put these concepts to work on real hardware
Axol is a dual-arm robot built for physical AI — teleoperate it, collect demonstrations, and deploy learned policies out of the box.