The intelligent factory robotics starter kit

The Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kit is the latest addition to the AMD’s 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 rapid development of hardware-accelerated applications for robotics, machine vision and industrial communication and control.

“The Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kits builds on the success of our Kria SOMs and KV260 Vision AI Starter Kit for AI and embedded developers, providing roboticists with a complete, out-of-the-box solution for this rapidly growing application space,” said Chetan Khona, senior director of Industrial, Vision, Healthcare and Sciences Markets at AMD. “Roboticists will now be able to work in their standard development environment on a platform that has all the interfaces and capabilities needed to be up and running in less than an hour. The KR260 Starter Kit is an ideal platform to accelerate robotics innovation and easily take ideas to production at scale.”

With industry analyst firm Omdia forecasting the robotics components market to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.4% between 2019 and 2025, with the overall world markets revenue to increase to approximately $126 billion by 20251, the Kria KR260 end-to-end adaptive robotics platform is expected to deliver nearly a 5X productivity gain over competitive, Nvidia GPU-based solutions2. 

Additionally, by accelerating the design cycle compared to chip-down design, the Kria SOM portfolio typically offers up to 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 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 easy evaluation and a seamless 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 commercialisation of industrial-grade robotic solutions targeting Kria SOMs. The low-latency, adaptive computing architecture of Kria SOMs implemented with KRS and ROS 2 can deliver over 8X better performance/watt3 and up to 3.5X lower latency4 compared to competitive GPU-based solutions. 

The KR260 also includes support for the widely-adopted 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.

“The Kria SOM family and KR260 Starter Kit provide the robotics community with a great combination of performance, flexibility and rapid development time,” said Brian Gerkey, CEO of Open Robotics. “Users can create software-defined hardware and build solutions offering high performance per watt, with security, energy efficiency and adaptability. Open Robotics is excited to be collaborating with AMD-Xilinx to understand and address the needs of roboticists using hardware acceleration to build new robot applications with the KR260 development platform.” 

Photo caption: The Kria KR260 Starter Kit from AMD is a complete out-of-the-box solution for the rapid development of hardware-accelerated applications for robotics, machine vision and industrial communication and control

1. Market Report: Robotic Components by Tractica | Omdia, Publication Date: 2Q20

2. Testing conducted as of December 1, 2021, on a test system comprising Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier Developer Kit and Jetson Nano Developer Kit using Isaac ROS SDK 4.6.1; Kria KV260 Starter Kit based on Kria K26 SOM, using Vitis Unified SW Platform 2021.2 and Kria Robotics Stack.  Development time accounts for tool chain setup with ROS 2, cross-compilation of host code, and creation and build of accelerator implementing two functions: doublevadd_publisher and accelerated_doublevadd_publisher available at https://github.com/ros-acceleration/acceleration_examples. 

3. Testing conducted as of February 1, 2022, on a test system comprising Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier Developer Kit using Isaac ROS SDK 4.6.1; Kria KV260 Starter Kit based on Kria K26 SOM using Vitis Unified SW Platform 2021.2 and Kria Robotics Stack. Rectify and Resize functions from the ROS Perception Stack, available at https://github.com/ros-acceleration/acceleration_examples, are accelerated on Kria and Nvidia platforms; power and performance are measured.

4. Testing conducted as of February 1, 2022, on a test system comprising Nvidia Jetson Nano Developer Kit using Isaac ROS SDK 4.6.1; Kria KV260 Starter Kit based on the Kria K26 SOM using Vitis Unified SW Platform 2021.2, and Kria Robotics Stack. Rectify and Resize functions from the ROS Perception Stack, available at https://github.com/ros-acceleration/acceleration_examples, are accelerated on Kria and Nvidia platforms. Execution time is measured.