Edge AI Deployment Beyond Models: A BSP-Aware Systems Framework for Industrial Embedded Platforms

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong applicability in edge industrial applications, yet their deployment remains severely constrained by requirements for deterministic low latency and stable execution under resource limitations. Existing frameworks either rely on bloated general-purpose designs or force developers into opaque, hardware-specific closed-source ecosystems, leading to hardware lock-in limitation and poor cross-platform adaptability. Observing that modern AI agents can efficiently search and tune configurations to generate highly optimized low-level kernels for standard LLM operators, we propose EdgeFM, a lightweight, agent-driven VLM/LLM inference framework tailored for cross-platform industrial edge deployment. EdgeFM removes non-essential features to reduce single-request latency, and encapsulates agent-tuned kernel optimizations as a modular library of reusable skills. By allowing direct invocation of these skills rather than waiting for closed-source implementations, it effectively closes the performance gap long dominated by proprietary toolchains. The framework natively supports mainstream platforms including x86 and NVIDIA Orin SoCs, and represents the first end-to-end VLA deployment on the domestic Horizon Journey platform, enhancing cross-platform portability. In most cases, it yields clearly better inference performance than conventional vendor-specific toolchains, achieving up to 1.49 times speedup over TensorRT-Edge-LLM on the NVIDIA Orin platform. Experimental results show that EdgeFM delivers favorable end-to-end inference performance, providing an open-source, production-grade solution for diverse edge industrial scenarios.

Edge deployment is often the preferred solution for industrial machine vision systems when low latency, data security, or limited connectivity are critical requirements. Several frameworks are available to optimise inference on edge devices; however, relatively few studies have systematically compared their inference-time performance under industrial deployment conditions. In this work, we present a comparative study of four widely used approaches for machine vision inference in industrial settings: plain PyTorch, ONNX Runtime, OpenVINO, and TensorRT. The evaluation focuses on inference time, covers several CPU- and GPU-based hardware platforms, and includes both conventional convolutional neural networks and a transformer-based vision model. For the hardware platforms and models evaluated, the results show that OpenVINO achieves the lowest inference time on CPUs, while TensorRT achieves the lowest inference time on GPUs. However, TensorRT does not outperform plain PyTorch for the transformer-based model considered in this study.

Edge AI model deployment is a multi-stage engineering process involving model conversion, operator compatibility handling, quantization calibration, runtime integration, and accuracy validation. In practice, this workflow is long, failure-prone, and heavily dependent on deployment expertise, particularly when targeting hardware-specific inference runtimes. This technical report presents AIPC (AI Porting Conversion), an AI agent-driven approach for constrained automation of AI model deployment. AIPC decomposes deployment into standardized, verifiable stages and injects deployment-domain knowledge into agent execution through Agent Skills, helper scripts, and a stage-wise validation loop. This design reduces both the expertise barrier and the engineering time required for hardware deployment. Using Qualcomm AI Runtime (QAIRT) as the primary scenario, this report examines automated deployment across representative vision, multimodal, and speech models. In the cases covered here, AIPC can complete deployment from PyTorch to runnable QNN/SNPE inference within 7-20 minutes for structurally regular vision models, with indicative API costs roughly in the range of USD 0.7-10. For more complex models involving less-supported operators, dynamic shapes, or autoregressive decoding structures, fully automated deployment may still require further advances, but AIPC already provides practical support for execution, failure localization, and bounded repair.