AMD has unveiled Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kit, the latest in its Kria product line-up of adaptive system-on-module (SOMs) and develop kits – a move to address fast-growing robotics markets.

The scalable and out-of-box development platform for robotics, the Kria KR260 allows system vendors to seamlessly produce their design layout with existing Kria K26 adaptive SOMs.

Coming embedded with native ROS 2 support, pre-built interfaces, and standard framework for robotics, the new SOM starter kit enables rapid development pf hardware-accelerated applications for robotics, machine vision and industrial communications 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.”

According to market research firm Omdia, the worldwide robotics components market is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.4% from 2019 through 2025 to hit approximately US$ 126 billion in total revenues in 2025.

Huge Market Opportunities Ahead

To cash in on the bullish prospects, AMD is scrambling to set its product line-up from competition.

For example, the Kria KR260 end-to-end adaptive robotics platform is expected to deliver nearly a 5X productivity gain over competitive, Nvidia GPU-based solutions.

Additionally, by accelerating the design cycle compared to chip-down design, the Kria SOM portfolio typically offers an upward of nine-month savings in time-to-deployment, suggesting that the start  time becomes quick and easy for all kinds of developers with no FPGA expertise required.

The KR260 hardware platform also 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 commercialization of industrial-grade robotic solutions targeting Kria SOMs.

Higher Productivity

The low-latency, adaptive computing architecture of Kria SOMs implemented with KRS and ROS 2 can deliver over 8X better performance/watt  and up to 3.5X lower latency 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.” 

The Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kit is priced at U$$349 and is immediately available from AMD and its network of worldwide distributors. The KR260 starter kit adds to the available Kria KV260 Vision AI Starter Kit, providing an easy-to-use development platform for designing vision applications.