Valve's Steam Deck is sold as a video game console, but could it also be the best new tool for robotics development? Or is it just a gimmick?💬 Join the disc...
If your referring to a tablet as in either an Android tablet or iOS iPad, then I’d say targeting the Steam Deck from a general software stack perspective would be a lot simpler, given its more like general compute hardware, like any laptop, rather than a limited mobile OS. Also, the amd64 CPU architecture may help in running other legacy components of a software stack that can’t be recompiled or are not source available. Having complete control and choice of desktop OSs in a handheld form factor alone would be great for field robotics; just not sure it could compete with similar arm based handhelds in terms of battery life convenience or power budget.
That horse power could still be advantageous when dealing with tasks beyond a cheap SBC, but don’t require a workstation either. Like orbiting around high resolution 3D point clouds in a 3D viewer streamed from the robot in real time, or visualizing dense, uncompressed 3D meshes or voxel maps reconstructed from surveys using visual SLAM.
If your referring to a tablet as in either an Android tablet or iOS iPad, then I’d say targeting the Steam Deck from a general software stack perspective would be a lot simpler, given its more like general compute hardware, like any laptop, rather than a limited mobile OS. Also, the amd64 CPU architecture may help in running other legacy components of a software stack that can’t be recompiled or are not source available. Having complete control and choice of desktop OSs in a handheld form factor alone would be great for field robotics; just not sure it could compete with similar arm based handhelds in terms of battery life convenience or power budget.
That horse power could still be advantageous when dealing with tasks beyond a cheap SBC, but don’t require a workstation either. Like orbiting around high resolution 3D point clouds in a 3D viewer streamed from the robot in real time, or visualizing dense, uncompressed 3D meshes or voxel maps reconstructed from surveys using visual SLAM.