Arduino VENTUNO Q’s dual-brain architecture pairs a Qualcomm Dragonwing IQ8 Sprocessor with a real-time STM32H5 microcontroller. | Source: Qualcomm
Arduino S.r.l., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Technologies Inc., recently opened pre-orders for VENTUNO Q, a edge AI platform powered by the Qualcomm Dragonwing IQ8 Series. Arduino built the board for developers, prioritizing familiarity and ease of use with the right software, accessories, and extensions.
While this is Arduino’s first intentional step into robotics, Marcello Majonchi, chief product officer of Arduino at Qualcomm, said the company has more than 20 years of experience working with robotics developers.
“This is the first intentional step for a product that is meant to be used as a single point of control of a modern robotics platform,” he told The Robot Report. “At the same time, Arduino is extensively used in the robotics domain, and there are thousands of different types of robots that, over the past 20 years, have been developed by the community and powered either in some features or in entirety with an Arduino product.”
Qualcomm integrates Arduino technology
Last year, Arduino was acquired by Qualcomm, which quickly gave the Monza, Italy-based company access to more resources and a new base of customers. This, along with recent advances in generative AI and processor sizes, made the new board feel like a natural evolution, said Majonchi.
“We have this amazing computing power. We have this ecosystem that is just waiting for something with an easier way for people to be able to translate their vision into reality,” he noted. “What is the gap that we need to bridge from a hardware perspective and from a software tooling and frameworks perspective so that you don’t need five different Ph.D.s to figure out how to build up an AMR?”
Technical details of the VENTUNO Q
VENTUNO Q has a dual-brain architecture. It pairs a Dragonwing IQ-8275 processor, delivering up to 40 dense TOPS of AI performance, with 16 GB LPDDR5 memory, 64 GB eMMC, and expandable M.2 NVMe storage alongside a dedicated STM32H5 real-time microcontroller. Arduino said this enables systems that don’t just interpret sensor data, but also respond to it physically, immediately, and offline.
The board ships with pre-loaded Ubuntu, distributed by Canonical. The Arduino App Lab offers a fast path to a working prototype. Developers can also choose VS Code, native Linux tools, or any existing workflow. On the MCU side, the Arduino Core on Zephyr RTOS is designed to provide deterministic, real-time control of motors, CAN-FD, PWM, and high-speed GPIO.
When building the board, Arduino said it wanted to ensure that much of the things customers expect from any of its other boards carries over into the VENTUNO Q. This is because there is a large ecosystem of accessories and add-ons that are compatible with a standard Arduino board. Replicating that system gives customers an option they’re familiar with, making it easier to assemble different components, the company claimed.
“It’s all about accessibility in the sense of bringing down the access barrier to this technology and demystify it both on the software and on the hardware side, so that almost anybody who has an idea has a path to bringing that idea to life,” Majonchi said.
Edge computing will be key for real world deployments
A key aspect of the VENTUNO Q board is its ability to provide edge computing for robots.
“One of the blockers of the robotics industry to get into the AI era was the fact that models, until just a couple of years back, were stuck on the cloud,” Majonchi said. “If you want to run a robot, you need more than just near-real-time response. You need real-time response, and you need to have, ideally in the same platform, the sensing, the reasoning, and the actuation in order to orchestrate all the behaviors.”
“[Edge computing] is the only way to really fulfill many of the constraints of real-world deployments of these robots that might end up in warehouses or manufacturing sites that are offshore, where you cannot expect even close to a reliable high-speed connection to the internet,” he continued.
The technology has advanced to make this level of computing on the edge possible, observed Majonchi. In combination with the high power-to-computation performance ratio, this created a good starting point for Arduino, he said.
Arduino’s App Labs lets customers build robot applications one brick at a time
Through Arduino App Lab, developers can run a curated library of NPU-optimized models out of the box. These span large language models (LLMs), vision-language models (VLMs), speech recognition, and object and gesture detection.
Developers can also bring their own GGUF-format model from Hugging Face, or train and quantize custom models via the integrated Edge Impulse Studio. LLMs and VLMs can also be deployed in just a few lines of code using the Qualcomm Gen AI Developer Tool (GenieX), Qualcomm’s open-source on-device Gen AI runtime.
Majonchi compared App Lab to building with Legos. “You just need to assemble those bricks and recreate connecting code, which is orders of magnitude simpler than what you would do in a normal platform out there,” he said.
The company has designed and validated the platform for commercial deployment across robotics, industrial edge AI, smart cities, AI vision systems, and education.
“We created a developer environment that was not inventing new technologies, but was just abstracting existing technologies, containers, ROS, and AI models into a single place where people would find inspirations and a framework that is easy to approach, and at the same time not constraining,” Majonchi said.
Works with Arduino hopes to make commercial deployments possible
Once a VENTUNO Q design is ready for commercial deployment, the same Dragonwing IQ8 processor will soon be available in production-grade SOM form factors from partners, preserving the software stack, AI models, and application logic built during prototyping.
SECO, a leading provider of edge computing and AI industrial solutions, and Toradex, a specialist in industrial-grade SOMs, are among the first to support this pathway under the “Works with Arduino” program.
“Arduino is the ultimate prototyping platform,” said Majonchi. ‘Enthusiasts, teachers, and professionals have been standardizing in many different industries, from automotive to space, the way that they are prototyping.”
“At the same time, there are some specificities of a production setup that are slightly different from a prototyping setup,” he added. “There is an optimization side. There is long-term availability of components, and so on.”
“So, thanks to the fact that we are now part of the Qualcomm family, we have created a program that we announced together with the release of the VENTUNO Q that is trying to really support end customers that want to have the freedom and ease of prototyping, but then want a reliable path to scale into production in the most optimized way,” Majonchi said.
Beyond prototyping, VENTUNO Q has been designed for commercial deployment, powering everything from autonomous mobile robots and predictive maintenance to real-time quality inspection and hands-on STEM learning.
“Works with Arduino is really targeting OEMs out there that can basically take the same chipset from Qualcomm that is featured in our developer boards and build any type of solution, from system and modules to industrial computer and industrial gateways that can be featured in any type of robot, and be certified against the Arduino platform,” Majonchi said.
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Looking ahead, Majonchi said Arduino is interested in continuing to learn from and grow within the robotics industry. It parent company, Qualcomm, will be a big part of this.
“Our expertise lays in providing this abstraction layer for people to be able to take advantage of the technology. What we have been historically missing is access to cutting-edge technologies that we could take and bring to the masses. Together with Qualcomm, we now have both sides of the equation, so that we can solve the problem,” Majonchi said.
Qualcomm is also showing more interest in robotics. The company today said it is acquiring PickNik Inc., the curator of the MoveIt open-source framework. The companies plan to integrate MoveIt with Arduino VENTUNO Q and Qualcomm Dragonfly to give developers an easier path from AI models to planning, manipulation, and real-time control.
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