Raspberry Pi

A low-cost, credit-card-sized computer from the UK, a common onboard computer for beginner robotics.

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized single-board computer from the UK's Raspberry Pi Foundation and its subsidiary, Raspberry Pi Ltd, first released in 2012. It's built on an ARM processor, can run Linux (the official Raspberry Pi OS, or Ubuntu), and has a row of GPIO pins that can connect directly to sensors, servos, and motor driver boards. It's cheap, well documented, and backed by a large community, making it a common “brain” for teaching robotics and for low-cost platforms, capable of running ROS 2, reading a camera, and controlling a robot car. Its compute isn't enough to run large models, so in VLA work it's typically only responsible for collecting data and executing actions, while inference runs on a remote policy server with a GPU.

ExampleHugging Face's LeKiwi mobile manipulator uses a Raspberry Pi 5 as its onboard computer to collect camera and motor data; the policy runs inference on a laptop or GPU elsewhere and sends actions back.

Also called

RPi

Related

Microcontroller Unit (MCU) · Arduino / ESP32 Microcontroller Boards · Embedded System · Robot Operating System 2 · LeKiwi · Policy Server (Remote Inference)

Sources

Raspberry Pi - Wikipedia
Raspberry Pi 官网 (Chinese)