Recent trends demand flexibility in factory production lines, enabling them to produce immediately in changing environments.

“The recent severe labor shortage has led to a need for higher levels of automation,” said Kiran Vishal Thanjavur Bhaskar, AMD AECG manager.

Today, the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain issues, and rapid technological change are driving the adoption of robotics across factories and into new fields. AMD, with its acquisition of Xilinx, a leader in programmable field programmable gate array (FPGA) semiconductors, is accelerating its entry into this rapidly growing robotics market.

AMD held an event on the 18th to introduce its new lineup, including the latest Kria KR260 robotics starter kit. On this day, AMD introduced the Cria Robotics Starter Kit, which supports ROS2 and implements low latency and consistent performance.

Kiran Vishal, Manager, said, “As an IoT hub, robotics can perform innovative functions such as communication and management functions with 5G capabilities,” and “The robotics installation base is increasing in various environments such as agriculture, healthcare, delivery, cleaning, and maintenance outside of factories,” revealing the motivation behind developing AMD’s robotics platform. The Kria KR260 is a highly scalable and usable robotics development platform that, along with the existing Kria K26 adaptable SOM, is expected to facilitate a smooth transition to production. The new SOM starter kit is designed to enable faster development of hardware-accelerated applications for robotics, machine vision, and industrial communications and control. It supports native ROS2, a standard framework, and provides prebuilt interfaces tailored for robotics and industrial solutions.

The Kria SOM portfolio is designed to enable developers without FPGA expertise to easily begin development, enabling faster design cycles compared to chip-down approaches, reducing the build time by up to nine months.

In particular, the low-latency adaptive compute architecture of the Kria SOM, implemented with the Kria Robotics Stack (KRS) and ROS 2, delivers more than 8x better performance per watt and up to 3.5x less latency than GPU-based competing solutions.

KRS is an integrated robotics library and set of utilities that accelerates the development, maintenance, and commercialization of industrial robotics solutions based on the Kria SOM. This is a core part of the KR260 design experience, enabling the robotics community to more easily leverage the benefits of adaptive computing.

The KR260 supports Ubuntu, a widely used embedded operating system, and is compatible with the latest long-term support versions of Ubuntu Linux desktop from Canonical and ROS 2 Humble Hawksbill.

“The Cria SOM family and the KR260 starter kit deliver the benefits the robotics community needs: superior performance, flexibility, and reduced development time,” said Brian Gerke, CEO of Open Robotics. “Users can develop software-defined hardware to deliver superior solutions with security, energy efficiency, and adaptability.”

“The Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kit builds on the success of our Kria SOM and KV260 Vision AI Starter Kit among AI and embedded developers,” said Chetan Hona, AMD Senior Director. “Now, roboticists can work in a standard development environment on a platform that has all the interfaces and features they need to get up and running in less than an hour.”

Meanwhile, according to Omdia, a global research and consulting firm, the robotics components market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.4% until 2025, with the market size projected to increase to $126 billion by 2025.