The Kria Starter Kit includes an active marker LED board (based on an RPI PICO baseboard) and a Sony IMX636 Event sensor. I got the Kria KV260 SD card loaded with the image distributed by Prophesee (a modified version of petalinux that included the bistream for the imx636).
I successfully copied over the active markers zip files to the KV260 and ran the demo metavision embedded active marker executable Prophesee shipped with the starter kit, which involved a 3d scene representation and the active marker board pose represented by a block. You can also plug in a display to the KV260 and run the application locally: it will display the track of the marker board in a 2D graphical representation.
Pose of the marker board seemed to work okay, so I decided to modify the existing application to instead publish 6 DOF pose via ROS2.
I started this in April of 2025, but had many distractions which left me taking long breaks between being able to get the application working. There was also the challenge of cross-compilation using Petalinux tools, which requires a beefy machine (lots of ram and storage). I first tried to get Petalinux tools installed on a VM, and began creating a custom image with the modified active markers ROS2 code, however I ran into multiple issues (likely VM related).I then found the Kria docker repo, which was exactly what I needed to set up an environment to compile the active markers code without having to fight dependencies on the host KV260 petalinux OS. I had the perfect playground to install what I needed (included ROS2 humble).
Revisiting the Project: Finally in December of 2025, I was able to get the code working and publishing pose with the LED marker board in view. I did notice that these event sensors do require bias tuning to be able to detect the marker board correctly and register tracks: future work could include bias tuning and adjusting focus to be able to detect the marker board reliably past ~2 meters. The hope is that I can push everything in the docker container to docker hub, with the container including the debian package for the active markers ROS2 code -pending permission from Prophesee
Visualizing Pose in RVIZ2
I was unable to distribute the source code for this application as it is bound by specific licensing requirements, but pending the above constraints, anyone can and should be able to replicate this. For now, you can check out this community group which is a great resource for getting started with Neuromorphic sensors.
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