MassRobotics, a Boston-based innovation hub and startup cluster focused on the needs of the robotics community, is collaborating with AMD, a manufacturer of computing, graphics and visualization technologies, to introduce and deliver these technologies to robotics startups. The partnership is designed to bring the industrial suite of AMD tools to robotics startups to help them further develop solutions for automation, mobility, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine vision-related applications.
This collaboration is coming at a time when robotics are steadily growing in North America. The International Federation of Robotics reported that Q1 robotic sales in North America were up 28% compared with Q1 2021.
To continue encouraging growth, as part of the collaboration AMD is providing offerings, such as the Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kit and Kria Robotic Stack (KRS), which are focused on bringing easy-to-integrate hardware acceleration of robot operating system (ROS) 2 to MassRobotics resident startups. The AMD Kria robotics starter kit, tool flows and accelerated libraries enable functions, such as communication, control, vision, AI, safety and security features in robotics systems to be targeted for intelligent factories, farms, warehouses and hospitals.
As the development platform for volume production Kria K26 system-on-modules (SOMs), the KR260 is built for robotics and multiple industrial applications, and includes high-performance interfaces and native ROS 2 support. MassRobotics startups can leverage pre-built accelerated applications for Kria SOMs from the AMD Xilinx App Store as a starting point for their ROS-centric development. The Kria KR260 has Ubuntu 2022.04 support from Canonical as well as ROS 2 support from Open Robotics.
“Kria SOMs were developed to make the benefits of adaptive computing accessible to roboticists, software and AI developers in small and medium-sized businesses,” said Chetan Khona, senior director of industrial, vision, healthcare and sciences markets at AMD. “Our close work with MassRobotics builds on that mission and we look forward to enabling their resident startups with scalable, low-latency and deterministic embedded computing technology as the de facto building blocks of next-generation robotics.”
