Acceleration Robotics, a robotics semiconductor startup based in the Basque Country, Spain, will collaborate with Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), the industry’s high-performance and adaptive computing leader to expand its presence in the robotics market. Specifically, the company will develop new robotics capabilities for AMD Kria system-on-modules (SOMs) and adaptive system-on-chips (SoCs).

Previous to the AMD acquisition of Xilinx, Acceleration Robotics had worked closely with Xilinx to create various robotics-specific hardware designs. Eventually, it fulfilled the objective of enabling roboticists to use Xilinx adaptive computing solutions with the Robot Operating System (ROS).  This relationship is now expanding into AMD products optimized for ROS 2, which presents a more modern and popular robotics framework.

Robot Operating System

ROS is the common language in robotics and most companies building real robots use it today, including Apple, Intel, Softbank Robotics, Bosch, etc. The ROS-based robotics market was valued at US$42.69 billion in 2021^[1] and is projected to reach US$87.92 billion in 2030. Moreover, about 55 percent of the total commercial robots to be shipped in 2024 will use ROS^[2].

Improve Computations in ROS 2

Specifically, the collaboration between Acceleration Robotics and AMD will focus on improving robotics computations with ROS 2 in several areas. These include robotics message-passing infrastructure, robotics perception, control or navigation, among others.

Víctor Mayoral-Vilches, a former Systems Architect at Xilinx and the founder of Acceleration Robotics, will lead the collaboration from Acceleration Robotics’ side. The results are partially being disclosed through the ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group. Moreover, they are contributed back to the ROS community. 

“We are excited to see our continued effort with Xilinx extending into AMD. Also, we look forward to a close collaboration with their engineering teams on producing architectural blueprints for robotics using ROS. AMD’s technology is a perfect fit for robots, wherein latency and determinism rule over everything else. We’re especially thrilled to explore how AMD FPGAs, adaptive SoCs and SOMs, as well as other compute solutions can be mixed together to create robot-specific processing units. This is what we call Robotic Processing Units (RPUs)” — Víctor Mayoral-Vilches, founder of Acceleration Robotics.

¹ ROS Based Robot Market by Robot Type

² The Rise of ROS: Nearly 55% of total commercial robots shipped in 2024 Will Have at Least One Robot Operating System package Installed