I’m always thinking “What Would Make A Better Robot?”.
Raspberry Pi has remained the best choice for most GoPiGo3 users. There are low cost versions, and there are big and fast versions for more demanding users.
For basic robot control, the Raspberry Pi family has added a series of microcontrollers (RP2040). The GoPiGo3 has a custom microcontroller with far more capabilities than the Raspberry Pi microcontroller products.
We are, though, entering a new computing age where “old” linear and even multi-processing programming techniques, on processor architectures with 4 to 20 cores are being augmented by massively parallel programming techniques on “Neural Processing Units” (NPU) and “Graphical Processing Units” (GPU).
The Raspberry Pi has attempted to meet these new needs with a couple “AI Hats”, that provide serious users with the NPU capabilities, while maintaining the flexibility and support of the Pi OS ecosystem.
Recently I saw a user declare he was done with Raspberry Pi, and had bought the latest Arduino Uno Q board which combines a “standard multi-core processor” with a small NPU, and a microcontroller on one board. At first glance I was intrigued by the completeness of the board for introductory robots, but today I read that he was hitting the main reason I will probably never leave the Raspberry Pi family - to update he had to flash a new OS, and lost everything he had on the existing OS card.
They will obviously improve, but being on the “bleeding edge” is not the dragons I want to be fighting.