Kria Robotics Stack (KRS), a ROS 2 superset for industry

[vmayoral]

The Kria™ Robotics Stack (KRS) is a ROS 2 superset for industry, an integrated set of robot libraries and utilities to accelerate the development, maintenance and commercialization of industrial-grade robotic solutions while using adaptive computing. KRS provides to ROS 2 users an easy and robust path to hardware acceleration. It allow ROS 2 roboticists to create custom secure compute architectures with higher productivity. To do so, KRS leverages Xilinx technology targeting the Kria SOM portfolio to deliver low latency (real-fast), determinism (predictable), real-time (on-time), security and high throughput to robotics.

We announced at Adapt 2021 the alpha release of KRS around Foxy.

Dependencies of KRS alpha release:

• ROS 2 Foxy Fitzroy (install instructions)
• Xilinx Vitis™ 2020.2.2 (install instructions)

Features in KRS alpha release:

1. tight integration of Xilinx’s hardware acceleration ecosystem into ROS 2 through ament and colcon extensions.
2. support for KV260 and ZCU102 reference hardware platforms.
3. custom Yocto/PetaLinux root file systems, built from the ROS workspace and easily customizable
4. tooling to seamlessly produce and manage real-time an distributed mixed-critical embedded systems aligned with ROS 2 development flows (see colcon-acceleration verbs)
5. hardware acceleration reference designs (see acceleration_examples), comprehensive tutorials and documentation.
6. Draft of reference architecture and conventions for ROS 2 hardware acceleration (see PR).

Many components of KRS have been disclosed and made available open source by Xilinx under an Apache 2.0 license. Instructions and examples to try it out are available here.