The Rockchip RK3566 is a power-efficient system-on-chip (SoC) from the RK35xx series, aimed at edge devices, IoT and robotics. It features a quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 CPU (clocked up to about 1.8 GHz depending on the board implementation) and an Arm Mali-G52 2EE GPU supporting OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0/3.2, Vulkan 1.1 and OpenCL 2.0.
The chip includes a built-in NPU accelerator for AI tasks (Rockchip cites roughly 1 TOPS of performance), supports LPDDR4 memory and provides hardware video decoding. Thanks to its low power draw and integrated CPU/GPU/NPU, it is a popular choice in tablets, set-top boxes, NVRs and small robotics platforms.
The RK3566 serves as the compute unit in, among others, Pollen Robotics' open-source Microduck robot, where it drives the servos and runs trained motion policies.
AI System-on-Chip (SoC) · serves as: Embedded main processor, High-level compute, AI Inference.
Which group Rockchip RK3566 belongs to and how it is built
Compute Modules is a subcategory of hardware components that provide processing power for robotic systems. It encompasses onboard computers, single-board computers (SBCs), AI accelerators, embedded processors, GPU/NPU compute modules, and other units responsible for processing sensor data and executing control logic. These modules form the foundation of modern autonomous, humanoid, and perception-capable robots.
Component type encompassing System-on-Chip designs used as primary compute units in embedded devices, edge AI, and robotics applications.
