AMD Robotics Starter Kit Kick-Starts the Intelligent Factory of the Future
May 17, 2022
News
AMD announced the Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kit, the latest addition to the Kria portfolio of adaptive system-on-modules (SOMs) and developer kits.
A scalable and out-of-the-box development platform for robotics, the Kria KR260 offers a seamless path to production deployment with the existing Kria K26 adaptive SOMs. With native ROS 2 support, the standard framework for robotics application development, and pre-built interfaces for robotics and industrial solutions, the new SOM starter kit enables the development of hardware-accelerated applications for robotics, machine vision, and industrial communication and control.
The KR260 hardware platform provides pre-built interfaces for robotics and industrial solutions that, combined with a growing list of accelerated applications delivered via the AMD-Xilinx App Store, enable evaluation and a ideal path to deployment.
Central to the KR260 design experience and making the benefits of adaptive computing more accessible to the robotics community is the Kria Robotics Stack (KRS), an integrated set of robot libraries and utilities that use hardware to accelerate the development, maintenance, and commercialization of industrial-grade robotic solutions targeting Kria SOMs. The low-latency, adaptive computing architecture of Kria SOMs implemented with KRS and ROS 2 are designed to deliver over 8X better performance/watt3 and up to 3.5X lower latency compared to competitive GPU-based solutions.
The KR260 also includes support for the Ubuntu embedded operating system, providing compatibility with the latest long-term support (LTS) versions of Ubuntu Linux Desktop (22.04) from Canonical and ROS 2 Humble Hawksbill.
AMD is collaborating with Open Robotics, the creators of ROS 2 and other open software and hardware platforms for robotics, to validate and ensure compliance of our ROS 2 implementation for the robotics community.
By accelerating the design cycle compared to chip-down design, the Kria SOM portfolio typically offers up to a nine-month savings in time-to-deployment, meaning getting started becomes quick and easy for all kinds of developers with no FPGA expertise required.
The Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kit is priced at $349 and is immediately available from AMD and its network of worldwide distributors. The KR260 starter kit adds to the available Kria KV260 Vision AI Starter Kit, providing a development platform for designing vision applications.
AMD will showcase the Kria products at the 2022 Embedded Vision Summit, May 16-19 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Visit the AMD-Xilinx booth #319 to see the latest technology demonstrations or check out the track session, “Introducing the Kria Robotics Starter Kit, Robotics and Machine Vision for Smart Factories” on May 17 at 2:40 p.m. to learn more.
For more information, visit: www.amd.com/en
