Avnet attended AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas in December to demonstrate how edge-to-cloud solutions accelerate innovation.
At the booth, seven hands-on demos showcased real-world edge-to-cloud innovation:
- Hand-Gesture Robotics Control (Qualcomm QCS6490): This demo showcased real-time Vision AI inference running fully at the edge on Qualcomm QCS6490. Hand-gesture recognition was used to control both direction and speed of a robotic vehicle. ROS2 messages were generated from inference output and streamed to a live robotics simulation, while telemetry and inference metadata were securely ingested into /IOTCONNECT.
- Edge People Detection & Tracking (Advantech ICAM-540): An industrial smart-camera solution built on NVIDIA Jetson Orin, performing real-time people detection and multi-object tracking at the edge. Inference results, bounding boxes, and system health metrics were streamed into /IOTCONNECT for visualization, monitoring, and downstream analytics.
- FPGA-Driven Industrial Gesture Recognition (ZUBoard-1CG): This demo highlighted deterministic, low-latency gesture recognition implemented directly in FPGA fabric. Recognized gestures were converted into control events and securely published to /IOTCONNECT, demonstrating how FPGA acceleration can support real-time industrial HMI use cases.
- High-Performance Edge Vision AI (AMD Ryzen™ 7 AI): A high-performance x86 edge AI platform demonstrating computer-vision workloads running locally with cloud connectivity for device management, telemetry, and model lifecycle orchestration through /IOTCONNECT.
- Jetson Orin NX Edge Inference Pipeline: This demo demonstrated a modular AI inference pipeline optimized for NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX, performing accelerated vision inference at the edge with secure device onboarding and cloud integration via /IOTCONNECT.
- Raspberry Pi AI Cloud Inference Pipeline: A lightweight edge-to-cloud AI pipeline using Raspberry Pi for data ingestion and cloud-based inference. The demo highlighted secure connectivity, telemetry streaming leveraging Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, and simplified AI enablement for cost-sensitive deployments.
- Connected AI-Enabled Drone Telemetry: This demo showcased a connected UAV platform streaming telemetry, sensor data, and AI-derived insights into /IOTCONNECT. The solution demonstrated secure connectivity, real-time monitoring, and cloud-based analytics for autonomous systems.
Each demo reinforced the theme: AI running closer to devices, seamlessly syncing with the cloud, and scaling securely.
Together, these solutions highlight Avnet’s partner-driven ecosystem—combining hardware leaders like Qualcomm, AMD/Xilinx, and NVIDIA Jetson with Avnet’s software and AWS services—to accelerate time to value across industries such as industrial, retail and automotive.
“Our goal is simple: make edge AI adoption faster, easier and more secure,” said Jennifer Skinner-Gray, Senior Director of Supplier Technology Enablement at Avnet. “By bringing intelligence closer to devices and leveraging AWS for orchestration and scale, we’re helping customers move from prototype to production with confidence.”
/IOTCONNECT, Avnet’s cloud-based IoT platform acts as a control panel for connected devices. It provides end-to-end capabilities for device onboarding, management, monitoring and secure communication, while integrating with AWS and other cloud services. The platform uses Software Development Kits (SDKs) on devices to translate data to the /IOTCONNECT Cloud, which handles orchestration, storage, security and analytics. Through its Smart Portal, customers can manage devices, users, and tenants, configure rules and visualize data in real time.
Start your edge journey today with Avnet and AWS. /IOTCONNECT is available on the AWS Marketplace and with a pay-as-you-go option.