MassRobotics partners with AMD to advance adaptive computing in robotics

MassRobotics, an innovation hub and startup cluster focused on the needs of the robotics community, is partnering with chip giant AMD to introduce and deliver technologies to robotics startups.

Through the industrial suite of AMD tools, platforms and an accelerated app store designed for the robotics industry, robotics startups will be able to further develop innovative solutions around automation, mobility, AI and machine vision-related applications.

AMD, widely known for their FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) and adaptive SoCs (system-on-chips), are bringing 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 ROS 2 to MassRobotics resident startups.

The AMD Kria robotics starter kit, tool flows and accelerated libraries enable key 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 SOMs (system-on-modules), the KR260 is built for robotics and multiple industrial applications, complete with high-performance interfaces and native ROS 2 support for ease of development by roboticists and software developers.

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.

Chetan Khona, senior director of industrial, vision, healthcare and sciences markets at AMD, says: “Kria SOMs were developed to make the benefits of adaptive computing accessible to roboticists, software, and AI developers in small and medium-sized businesses.

“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.”

Deeply embedded in the robotics industry, AMD is also:

• a Gold Sponsor of ROSCon 2022, taking place in Kyoto Japan on October 19-21, 2022, an event to learn from and network with the ROS community; and
• joining MassRobotics at its Robotics Engineering Career Fair on October 20, 2022, as part of RoboBusiness in Santa Clara, California.

Based in the Boston area, MassRobotics is the first and largest independent nonprofit robotics startup escalator in the world whose mission is to grow and support robotics innovators and entrepreneurs. MassRobotics and its partners work together to enable robotics and related technologies to succeed as an industry.