BlackBerry announces collaboration with AMD to support robotics industry

NUREMBURG — At Embedded World, BlackBerry Limited announced a collaboration with AMD designed to try and improve robotic systems by enabling new levels of low latency and jitter, and repeatable determinism. Together, the companies will address the critical need for ‘hard’ real-time capabilities in robotics-focused hardware with an affordable and powerful platform that tries to deliver enhanced performance, reliability, and scalability for robotic systems in industrial and healthcare.

The platform combines BlackBerry® QNX® expertise in real-time foundational software solutions and the QNX® Software Development Platform (SDP) with heterogeneous hardware solutions powered by the AMD Kria™ K26 SOM. With Kria, an Arm® sub-system can power the advanced capabilities of the QNX microkernel real-time operating system (RTOS) while allowing users to run low latency, deterministic functions on the programable logic of the AMD Kria KR260 robotics starter kit.

This combination reportedly enables sensor fusion, data processing, real-time control, industrial networking, and reduced latency in robotic applications.

“With the QNX Software Development Platform customers can start development quickly on the AMD Kria KR260 Starter Kit and seamlessly scale to other higher performance AMD platforms as their needs evolve,” said Chetan Khona, senior director of Industrial, Vision, Healthcare and Sciences Markets, AMD. “Combining the industry-leading strengths of AMD and QNX will provide a foundation platform that opens new doors for innovation and takes the future of robotics technology well beyond the constraints experienced until now.”

“An integrated solution by BlackBerry QNX through our collaboration with AMD will provide an integrated software-hardware foundation offering real-time performance, low latency and determinism, to ensure that critical robotic tasks are executed with the same level of precision and responsiveness every single time,” said Grant Courville, VP Product & Strategy at BlackBerry QNX. “These are crucial attributes for industries carrying out finely tuned operations, such as the fast-growing industries of autonomous mobile robots and surgical robotics. Together with AMD, we are committed to driving technological advancements that address some of these most complex challenges and transform the future of the robotics industry.”