At the 2026 World Robot Expo held in August, Rockchip officially previewed the launch plan for its next-generation edge AI coprocessor, the RK1860. Scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of 2026, the new chip will deliver breakthrough improvements in multimodal large-model support and massive local agent concurrent computing power, continuously matching the ever-growing computing demands of humanoid robots and various service robots.
Rockchip has already established a dual-chip architecture system of “high-performance main controller + AI coprocessor.” The flagship RK3588 main controller paired with the RK1828 coprocessor has enabled on-device deployment of Vision-Language Models (VLM) on the robot side, allowing edge agents to autonomously complete environmental understanding, task planning, and intelligent decision-making without cloud dependency. The upcoming RK1860 will further enhance inference density and energy efficiency for edge AI.
From an application perspective, the RK1860 targets not only the high-profile humanoid robot sector but also the full spectrum of robot form factors including commercial cleaning robots, companion robots, lawn-mowing robots, and data collection terminals. The multi-form product matrix demonstrated by Rockchip at the expo shows that its edge platform already possesses the adaptability for diverse hardware forms and different business scenarios.
For the embedded industry, the imminent arrival of the RK1860 signals that edge AI computing is entering a new round of upgrades. As a provider of embedded core boards and industrial control solutions, Junyi Microelectronics will continue to monitor the technical specifications and development toolchain progress of the RK1860, in order to provide customers with hardware design and software adaptation support based on the new platform at the earliest opportunity, helping robot manufacturers shorten R&D cycles and accelerate time-to-market.
Source: Rockchip Official Website