Viam’s Robot Development Kit (RDK) consists of a server that can be installed on any computer and allows the platform to communicate with any hardware connected to it. There is also a lightweight Micro-RDK for resource-limited embedded systems.

Once installed, Viam’s software provides a straightforward way to handle all configuration, iteration, maintenance, and communication related to a smart machine. Run drivers, custom code, services like computer vision and machine learning, or any other kind of software through Viam’s intuitive UI.

All communications between machine components, including across the internet, use gRPC and protocol buffers to streamline integration, allowing Viam to provide many different SDKs to control machines in any popular programming language. Viam can also cache data and configurations locally and sync afterwards in low connectivity areas.

Viam uses WebRTC to make secure connectivity across network boundaries easier and faster, and to leverage signaling servers that mediate connection attempts between machines spread across multiple networks at scale, much like modern collaboration and video conferencing tools do.

Viam supports most common hardware components and complex capabilities out of the box, and these can be swapped out for others as needed within the Viam UI.

Viam cannot always anticipate every potential piece of hardware or software service a developer might want to use on their machine out of the box. To incorporate new technology, Viam is extensible so that it is easy to add support for any component or service as needed from our open marketplace, the Registry.