MassRobotics has announced it is collaborating with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) to introduce and deliver technologies to robotics startups. AMD offers an industrial suite of tools, platforms and an accelerated app store designed for the robotics industry. Thus, robotics startups will be able to further develop innovative solutions around automation, mobility, AI and machine vision-related applications.

Expansive Support to Robotics Startups

MassRobotics is the first and largest independent nonprofit robotics startup escalator. Specifically, its 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.

Meanwhile, AMD is widely known for their field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and adaptive system-on-chips (SoCs). The company’s Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kit and Kria Robotic Stack (KRS) 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. In particular, they target intelligent factories, farms, warehouses, and hospitals.

As the development platform for volume production Kria K26 system-on-modules (SoMs), KR260 is built for robotics and multiple industrial applications. Specifically, KR260 is 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.

“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.”

AMD is deeply embedded in the robotics industry. In fact, it is a Gold Sponsor of ROSCon 2022, which took place in Kyoto, Japan on October 19-21, 2022. Also, the company joined MassRobotics at its Robotics Engineering Career Fair on October 20, 2022, as part of RoboBusiness in Santa Clara, California.