The 2022 Hardware Acceleration Report in Robotics (download) captures the state-of-the art of hardware acceleration in robotics and presents robotic architects with a resource to consider while designing their robot brains.
After more than a year collecting data, distilling and speaking to roboticists to understand their views on hardware acceleration, we're happy to introduce the 2022 Hardware Acceleration Report in Robotics, a report that summarizes the state of hardware acceleration in the field of robotics and presents robotic architects with a resource to consider while designing their robot computational architectures.
The work presented in this report happened in two phases. First, a community survey conducted in both the ROS and the overall robotics communities helped grasp the interest behind the use of hardware acceleration in robotics. Input from this community survey was then used to drive the second phase, a hardware acceleration benchmarking effort. The most relevant results from these two phases are summarized in the report.
One aspect to highlight about this report is that its uses the Robot Operating System (ROS), as the common baseline in robotics. Rationale comes from the fact that most companies building real robots today use ROS or similar event-driven software frameworks. This report uses ROS as the common baseline in robotics to conduct the study. In particular, we use ROS 2 which presents a modern industry-accepted framework for robot application development and consider both bandwidth and latency to benchmark performance in robotics using a grey-box and non-functional benchmarking approach.
About the 2022 Hardware Acceleration Report in Robotics
Hardware acceleration will revolutionize robotics, enabling new applications by speeding up robot response times while remaining power-efficient. However, the diversity of acceleration options makes it difficult for roboticists to select the right computational resource for each task, defaulting to CPUs. This report captures the state-of-the art of hardware acceleration in robotics by following a quantitative approach and presents robotic architects with a resource to consider while designing their robot computational architectures. The report compares the most popular computation solutions in robotics used today through reproducible and measurable examples available at the ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group GitHub organization.
About Acceleration Robotics
Acceleration Robotics is a firm focused on designing customized brains for robots to hasten their response time. Founded by top robotic experts to deliver semiconductor building blocks for robots, the company leverages GPUs and FPGAs to create custom hardware that speeds up a robot's operation.