Posts by Sarunas Kalade
Running MolmoAct2 Robot Policy on an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 Mini PC
- 30 September 2026
Teaching a robot to “put the bowl on the plate and place the cream cheese inside the bowl” used to require a rack of data-center GPUs sitting behind the robot. In this blog we show how a modern vision-language-action (VLA) model, MolmoAct2, can look at a scene, read a plain-English instruction, and drive a robot arm to complete the task, all running on a single AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 “Strix Halo” mini PC with the ROCm software stack. No cloud, no external accelerator, just a compact tabletop machine.
Unlocking Sim2Real for a Robotic Arm with RL Accelerated by AMD Instinct GPUs
- 29 September 2026
Training a policy in simulation and transferring those weights to a real robot (sim2real) is a highly desirable goal in physical AI. Simulation scales data collection far beyond what a single robot can provide, but mismatches in physics and in the software stack make transfer difficult. In this blog post, we train a pick-and-lift policy for a UFactory XArm-6 with reinforcement learning on AMD Instinct GPUs, then deploy the same network on the real arm with a classical perception front-end in place of privileged simulator state.
Enabling Physical AI Agents with Lemonade
- 25 August 2026
In this blog we will demonstrate how to run local agents enabled by VLMs (Vision-Language Models) hosted by the Lemonade framework in the domain of robot control. These models allowed us to run an interactive robotic arm manipulation simulation entirely locally, showing the effectiveness of Lemonade for Physical AI.
Building Robotics Applications with Ryzen AI and ROS 2
- 09 February 2026
This blog showcases how to deploy power-efficient Ryzen AI perception models with ROS 2 - the Robot Operating System. We utilize the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (Strix-Halo) platform, which is equipped with an efficient Ryzen AI NPU and iGPU. The Ryzen AI CVML Library is used to deploy supported models efficiently on the Ryzen AI platform. All of the code is available on GitHub in the AMD Ryzers repository and was originally presented at ROSCon’25.
Fine-tuning Robotics Vision Language Action Models with AMD ROCm and LeRobot
- 14 July 2025
This blog showcases training and deploying robotics policy models on AMD Instinct™ GPUs using ROCm with Hugging Face’s LeRobot framework. Recent advancements in Vision Language Action Models (VLAs) represent a breakthrough in robotics AI, combining computer vision, language understanding, and robotic control into unified architectures that can process visual observations, understand task descriptions, and generate precise motor commands.