Acceleration Robotics, AMD partner to design robotic compute architectures with ROS

Acceleration Robotics and AMD are working together to develop new robotic capabilities for AMD’s Kria system-on-modules (SoMs) and adaptive system-on-chips (SoCs). Acceleration Robotics is a robotics semiconductor startup based in Basque Country, Spain. 

Before being acquired by AMD, Xilinx and Acceleration Robotics worked together to create robotics-specific hardware designs, with the goal of allowing roboticists to use Xilinx’s adaptive computing solutions with the Robot Operating System (ROS). 

ROS is used by many robotics companies to build real, commercial robots. About 55% of the total commercial robots to be shipped in 2024 will use ROS, according to ABI Research, a market-foresight advisory firm. 

Now, Acceleration Robotics is expanding its partnership and working with AMD and AMD products optimized for ROS 2. The collaboration will be led by Victor Mayoral-Vilches, a former Systems Architect at Xilinx and founder of Acceleration Robotics. 

“We are excited to see our continued effort with Xilinx extending into AMD and look forward to a close collaboration with their engineering teams on producing architectural blueprints for robotics using ROS,” Mayoral-Vilches said. “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, what we call Robotic Processing Units (RPUs).”

The collaboration will focus on improving robotics computations with ROS 2 for areas like the robotics message-passing infrastructure, robotics perception, control or navigation, among other areas. 

AMD completed its acquisition of Xilinx in February 2022 for $49 billion. Xilinx’s technology found its home in AMD’s Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group, a newly formed segment of the company. 

Acceleration Robotics was founded in 2020. The company designs customized brains to help shorten robots’ response times.  Its main product offering is ROBOTCORE, a hardware acceleration framework for ROS. ROBOTCORE helps developers build custom compute architectures for robots that make them faster, more deterministic and power efficient.