AMD Xilinx KR260 Robotics Starter Kit: Democratizing Smart Robots

Last summer, we got to go hands-on with AMD Xilinx's KV260 Vision AI Starter Kit, which combined the company's K26 System-on-a-Module (SoM) with a daughterboard that had copious IO for image recognition AI. At the time, we found the experience to be a bit rough around the edges. However, it was easy to see that the setup had a lot of promise with a potent FPGA, a solid foundation of good development tools, and plenty of IO. At the time, the KR260 Robotics Starter Kit had also been freshly announced, but wouldn't be available until later.

Well, that day has come. The KR260 uses the same K26 SoM as the KV260, but trades out all the camera IO for networking controllers and sensor inputs. This time the focus is on industrial robotics, which makes our job a little harder. With image recognition in the KV260 and adorable ...