Tag Archives: Coral

Coral moves out of beta

Posted by Vikram Tank (Product Manager), Coral Team

microchips on coral colored background

Last March, we launched Coral beta from Google Research. Coral helps engineers and researchers bring new models out of the data center and onto devices, running TensorFlow models efficiently at the edge. Coral is also at the core of new applications of local AI in industries ranging from agriculture to healthcare to manufacturing. We've received a lot of feedback over the past six months and used it to improve our platform. Today we’re thrilled to graduate Coral out of beta, into a wider, global release.

Coral is already delivering impact across industries, and several of our partners are including Coral in products that require fast ML inferencing at the edge.

In healthcare, Care.ai is using Coral to build a device that enables hospitals and care centers to respond quickly to falls, prevent bed sores, improve patient care, and reduce costs. Virgo SVS is also using Coral as the basis of a polyp detection system that helps doctors improve the accuracy of endoscopies.

In a very different use case, Olea Edge employs Coral to help municipal water utilities accurately measure the amount of water used by their commercial customers. Their Meter Health Analytics solution uses local AI to reduce waste and predict equipment failure in industrial water meters.

Nexcom is using Coral to build gateways with local AI and provide a platform for next-gen, AI-enabled IoT applications. By moving AI processing to the gateway, existing sensor networks can stay in service without the need to add AI processing to each node.

From prototype to production

Microchips on white background

Coral’s Dev Board is designed as an integrated prototyping solution for new product development. Under the heatsink is the detachable Coral SoM, which combines Google’s Edge TPU with the NXP IMX8M SoC, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, memory, and storage. We’re happy to announce that you can now purchase the Coral SoM standalone. We’ve also created a baseboard developer guide to help integrate it into your own production design.

Our Coral USB Accelerator allows users with existing system designs to add local AI inferencing via USB 2/3. For production workloads, we now offer three new Accelerators that feature the Edge TPU and connect via PCIe interfaces: Mini PCIe, M.2 A+E key, and M.2 B+M key. You can easily integrate these Accelerators into new products or upgrade existing devices that have an available PCIe slot.

The new Coral products are available globally and for sale at Mouser; for large volume sales, contact our sales team. By the end of 2019, we'll continue to expand our distribution of the Coral Dev Board and SoM into new markets including: Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, India, Thailand, Singapore, Oman, Ghana and the Philippines.

Better resources

We’ve also revamped the Coral site with better organization for our docs and tools, a set of success stories, and industry focused pages. All of it can be found at a new, easier to remember URL Coral.ai.

To help you get the most out of the hardware, we’re also publishing a new set of examples. The included models and code can provide solutions to the most common on-device ML problems, such as image classification, object detection, pose estimation, and keyword spotting.

For those looking for a more in-depth application—and a way to solve the eternal problem of squirrels plundering your bird feeder—the Smart Bird Feeder project shows you how to perform classification with a custom dataset on the Coral Dev board.

Finally, we’ll soon release a new version of the Mendel OS that updates the system to Debian Buster, and we're hard at work on more improvements to the Edge TPU compiler and runtime that will improve the model development workflow.

The official launch of Coral is, of course, just the beginning, and we’ll continue to evolve the platform. Please keep sending us feedback at [email protected].

Coral summer updates: Post-training quant support, TF Lite delegate, and new models!

Posted by Vikram Tank (Product Manager), Coral Team

Summer updates cartoon

Coral’s had a busy summer working with customers, expanding distribution, and building new features — and of course taking some time for R&R. We’re excited to share updates, early work, and new models for our platform for local AI with you.

The compiler has been updated to version 2.0, adding support for models built using post-training quantization—only when using full integer quantization (previously, we required quantization-aware training)—and fixing a few bugs. As the Tensorflow team mentions in their Medium post “post-training integer quantization enables users to take an already-trained floating-point model and fully quantize it to only use 8-bit signed integers (i.e. `int8`).” In addition to reducing the model size, models that are quantized with this method can now be accelerated by the Edge TPU found in Coral products.

We've also updated the Edge TPU Python library to version 2.11.1 to include new APIs for transfer learning on Coral products. The new on-device back propagation API allows you to perform transfer learning on the last layer of an image classification model. The last layer of a model is removed before compilation and implemented on-device to run on the CPU. It allows for near-real time transfer learning and doesn’t require you to recompile the model. Our previously released imprinting API, has been updated to allow you to quickly retrain existing classes or add new ones while leaving other classes alone. You can now even keep the classes from the pre-trained base model. Learn more about both options for on-device transfer learning.

Until now, accelerating your model with the Edge TPU required that you write code using either our Edge TPU Python API or in C++. But now you can accelerate your model on the Edge TPU when using the TensorFlow Lite interpreter API, because we've released a TensorFlow Lite delegate for the Edge TPU. The TensorFlow Lite Delegate API is an experimental feature in TensorFlow Lite that allows for the TensorFlow Lite interpreter to delegate part or all of graph execution to another executor—in this case, the other executor is the Edge TPU. Learn more about the TensorFlow Lite delegate for Edge TPU.

Coral has also been working with Edge TPU and AutoML teams to release EfficientNet-EdgeTPU: a family of image classification models customized to run efficiently on the Edge TPU. The models are based upon the EfficientNet architecture to achieve the image classification accuracy of a server-side model in a compact size that's optimized for low latency on the Edge TPU. You can read more about the models’ development and performance on the Google AI Blog, and download trained and compiled versions on the Coral Models page.

And, as summer comes to an end we also want to share that Arrow offers a student teacher discount for those looking to experiment with the boards in class or the lab this year.

We're excited to keep evolving the Coral platform, please keep sending us feedback at [email protected].

Coral updates: Project tutorials, a downloadable compiler, and a new distributor

Posted by Vikram Tank (Product Manager), Coral Team

coral hardware

We’re committed to evolving Coral to make it even easier to build systems with on-device AI. Our team is constantly working on new product features, and content that helps ML practitioners, engineers, and prototypers create the next generation of hardware.

To improve our toolchain, we're making the Edge TPU Compiler available to users as a downloadable binary. The binary works on Debian-based Linux systems, allowing for better integration into custom workflows. Instructions on downloading and using the binary are on the Coral site.

We’re also adding a new section to the Coral site that showcases example projects you can build with your Coral board. For instance, Teachable Machine is a project that guides you through building a machine that can quickly learn to recognize new objects by re-training a vision classification model directly on your device. Minigo shows you how to create an implementation of AlphaGo Zero and run it on the Coral Dev Board or USB Accelerator.

Our distributor network is growing as well: Arrow will soon sell Coral products.

Updates from Coral: A new compiler and much more

Posted by Vikram Tank (Product Manager), Coral Team

Coral has been public for about a month now, and we’ve heard some great feedback about our products. As we evolve the Coral platform, we’re making our products easier to use and exposing more powerful tools for building devices with on-device AI.

Today, we're updating the Edge TPU model compiler to remove the restrictions around specific architectures, allowing you to submit any model architecture that you want. This greatly increases the variety of models that you can run on the Coral platform. Just be sure to review the TensorFlow ops supported on Edge TPU and model design requirements to take full advantage of the Edge TPU at runtime.

We're also releasing a new version of Mendel OS (3.0 Chef) for the Dev Board with a new board management tool called Mendel Development Tool (MDT).

To help with the developer workflow, our new C++ API works with the TensorFlow Lite C++ API so you can execute inferences on an Edge TPU. In addition, both the Python and C++ APIs now allow you to run multiple models in parallel, using multiple Edge TPU devices.

In addition to these updates, we’re adding new capabilities to Coral with the release of the Environmental Sensor Board. It’s an accessory board for the Coral Dev Platform (and Raspberry Pi) that brings sensor input to your models. It has integrated light, temperature, humidity, and barometric sensors, and the ability to add more sensors via it's four Grove connectors. The secure element on-board also allows for easy communication with the Google Cloud IOT Core.

The team has also been working with partners to help them evaluate whether Coral is the right fit for their products. We’re excited that Oivi has chosen us to be the base platform of their new handheld AI-camera. This product will help prevent blindness among diabetes patients by providing early, automated detection of diabetic retinopathy. Anders Eikenes, CEO of Oivi, says “Oivi is dedicated towards providing patient-centric eye care for everyone - including emerging markets. We were honoured to be selected by Google to participate in their Coral alpha program, and are looking forward to our continued cooperation. The Coral platform gives us the ability to run our screening ML models inside a handheld device; greatly expanding the access and ease of diabetic retinopathy screening.”

Finally, we’re expanding our distributor network to make it easier to get Coral boards into your hands around the world. This month, Seeed and NXP will begin to sell Coral products, in addition to Mouser.

We're excited to keep evolving the Coral platform, please keep sending us feedback at [email protected].

You can see the full release notes on Coral site.

Introducing Coral: Our platform for development with local AI

Posted by Billy Rutledge (Director) and Vikram Tank (Product Mgr), Coral Team

AI can be beneficial for everyone, especially when we all explore, learn, and build together. To that end, Google's been developing tools like TensorFlow and AutoML to ensure that everyone has access to build with AI. Today, we're expanding the ways that people can build out their ideas and products by introducing Coral into public beta.

Coral is a platform for building intelligent devices with local AI.

Coral offers a complete local AI toolkit that makes it easy to grow your ideas from prototype to production. It includes hardware components, software tools, and content that help you create, train and run neural networks (NNs) locally, on your device. Because we focus on accelerating NN's locally, our products offer speedy neural network performance and increased privacy — all in power-efficient packages. To help you bring your ideas to market, Coral components are designed for fast prototyping and easy scaling to production lines.

Our first hardware components feature the new Edge TPU, a small ASIC designed by Google that provides high-performance ML inferencing for low-power devices. For example, it can execute state-of-the-art mobile vision models such as MobileNet V2 at 100+ fps, in a power efficient manner.

Coral Camera Module, Dev Board and USB Accelerator

For new product development, the Coral Dev Board is a fully integrated system designed as a system on module (SoM) attached to a carrier board. The SoM brings the powerful NXP iMX8M SoC together with our Edge TPU coprocessor (as well as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, RAM, and eMMC memory). To make prototyping computer vision applications easier, we also offer a Camera that connects to the Dev Board over a MIPI interface.

To add the Edge TPU to an existing design, the Coral USB Accelerator allows for easy integration into any Linux system (including Raspberry Pi boards) over USB 2.0 and 3.0. PCIe versions are coming soon, and will snap into M.2 or mini-PCIe expansion slots.

When you're ready to scale to production we offer the SOM from the Dev Board and PCIe versions of the Accelerator for volume purchase. To further support your integrations, we'll be releasing the baseboard schematics for those who want to build custom carrier boards.

Our software tools are based around TensorFlow and TensorFlow Lite. TF Lite models must be quantized and then compiled with our toolchain to run directly on the Edge TPU. To help get you started, we're sharing over a dozen pre-trained, pre-compiled models that work with Coral boards out of the box, as well as software tools to let you re-train them.

For those building connected devices with Coral, our products can be used with Google Cloud IoT. Google Cloud IoT combines cloud services with an on-device software stack to allow for managed edge computing with machine learning capabilities.

Coral products are available today, along with product documentation, datasheets and sample code at g.co/coral. We hope you try our products during this public beta, and look forward to sharing more with you at our official launch.