About Kakip

Why we developed Kakip.

There have been several “AI booms” in the past, but both hardware and software for advanced processing were not yet ready for practical use. Now that the global Internet environment has improved and hardware performance has evolved dramatically due to the high integration of IC chips, AI processing has begun to be implemented in society at a different pace than in the past. In such a situation, one of the challenges is to make robots intelligent, and edge AI processing (especially image processing) is important for robots to operate autonomously in the field.

Robots need to operate motors and actuators in real time while processing information from many sensors and cameras.

Kakip started its development with the objective of taking charge of high-performance AI image processing in isolation from the host. Kakip will be released first as a single board computer that can be easily handled for research and development of robotic computing, and in the future will be developed into a board product suitable for various embedded applications.

About Kakip logo mark

Although single-board computer products have been actively developed worldwide in recent years, there are unfortunately very few products originating from Japan. As we started to develop products with high-performance AI functions from Japan, we learned that “Kaki”, Japanese fruit name of persimmon, is one of the domestically produced fruits that have been exported to the world in a remarkably increasing volume, although in a different field. The logo was designed with a motif of a persimmon superimposed on a picture of a neural network, and was completed with the idea of going out into the world just as much as the persimmon. The development team had nicknamed this processor board “Kakip,” and we hoped that the endearing name would make it familiar to everyone.