Renesas RZ/V2H Robotics Development Kit handles AI vision, motor control, and power management with a single board

Renesas WS125-V2HRDKREFZ is a Robotics Development Kit (RDK) powered by Renesas RZ/V2H Arm Cortex-A55/R8/M33 microprocessor and designed for high‑performance AI vision applications leveraging the MPU’s built-in 80 TOPS (sparse) AI accelerator.

The kit ships with 16GB LPDDR4, 64MB QSPI flash, a 64GB microSD card, and appears to be partially inspired by the Raspberry Pi 5 with a 40-pin Raspberry Pi GPIO header, a 16-pin PCIe Gen3 FFC connector, two MIPI CSI connectors, and a micro HDMI port. Other features include a Gigabit Ethernet port, two USB 3.2 ports, two CAN-FD interfaces, and a 12-24V DC input voltage range.

Renesas WS125-V2HRDKREFZ specifications:

SoC – Renesas RZ/V2H
- CPU/MCU cores
  - 4x Arm Cortex-A55 cores up to 1.8 GHz
  - 2x Cortex-R8 real-time cores up to 800 MHz
  - Arm Cortex-M33 microcontroller core up to 200 MHz for system management
- GPU – Arm Mali-G31 GPU
- NPU – DRP-AI3 dynamically reconfigurable processor delivering up to 8 TOPS (INT8) or 80 TOPS (Sparse)
- Package – 1368-pin FCBGA (R9A09G057H44GBG)
System Memory – 16GB LPDDR4 @ 1600 MHz (2x 8GB)
Storage
- MicroSD card slot (the kit ships with a 64GB SanDisk microSD card)
- 64MB QSPI flash
Display I/F – Micro HDMI port
Camera I/F – 2x 22-pin 4-lane MIPI CSI-2 camera connectors
Networking
- Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port
USB
- 2x USB 3.2 Type-A ports
- 1x Micro USB port (SCIF)
Debugging – 10-pin JTAG connector
Expansion
- 40-pin color-coded “Raspberry Pi” GPIO header
- 16-pin PCIe Gen3 x1 FFC connector (same as the Raspberry Pi FFC connector)
- 2x CAN-FD connector
Power Supply – 12-24V up to 2A via DC jack
Dimensions – 85 x 72 mm

Renesas provides board setup files based on Ubuntu 24.04 Server/Desktop and ROS2, and RZ MPU software packages, along with evaluation licenses and release notes. The board is also open-source hardware, with the Japanese company providing hardware design files, including the BOM, circuit schematics, and PCB layout. You’ll find some documentation on Github.io, although some documents and the SDK require a (free) registration on the Renesas website, and some code on GitHub.

The Renesas RZ/V2H MPU’s heterogeneous architecture features application cores (Cortex-A55), real-time cores (Cortex-R8), and an 8 TOPS (INT8) NPU, which makes it ideal for robotics and drones since a single chip can handle applications, motor control, and AI Vision with external MCU or accelerators.

One example is a demo running PX4 on the RZ/V2H Robotics Development Kit shown in the video above. It combines AI vision, real‑time motor and flight control, and power management on a single board.

Renesas has not provided pricing information for the RZ/V2K RDK (WS125-V2HRDKREFZ), but I suspect it may sell for around $400-$500 based on the specifications and target markets. You’ll find more details, including some hardware and software documents, on the product page.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.