Acceleration Robotics collaborating with Microchip to fasten robot computations with ROS 2 and RISC-V FPGA SoCs

Acceleration Robotics, who leads the ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration community efforts is working with Microchip to speed-up robot computations using hardware acceleration on Microchip’s PolarFire® SoC solutions

VITORIA-GASTEIZ, Spain – Acceleration Robotics —a robotics semiconductor startup based in the Basque Country, Spain— will collaborate with Microchip, a leading provider of smart, connected and secure embedded control solutions to expand its presence in the robotics market through the integration of their PolarFire® RISC-V FPGA SoC solutions into the Robot Operating System (ROS 2), the de facto standard for robot application development.

Following a previous cooperation between Microchip and Acceleration Robotics to integrate ROS 2 in the PolarFire SoC, both companies are now engaging into further collaborations. This includes an upcoming webinar to disseminate the current capabilities available for roboticists to leverage Microchip’s silicon while using the latest ROS 2 distribution (Humble Hawksbill). To do so, Acceleration Robotics extended the PolarFire SoC Yocto BSP offered by Microchip and is offering support and custom solutions on its ROBOTCORE® Framework FPGA and GPU hardware acceleration framework for ROS.

ROS is the common language in robotics and most companies building real robots use it today (see public list of companies using ROS). The ROS-based robotics market was valued at $42.69 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach $87.92 billion in 2030. Moreover, about 55% of the total commercial robots to be shipped in 2024 will use ROS. The Acceleration Robotics and Microchip collaboration will focus on improving robotics computations with ROS 2 and facilitating the use of hardware acceleration.

Víctor Mayoral-Vilches, the founder of Acceleration Robotics, will lead the technical collaboration from Acceleration Robotics’ side. Their results are partially being integrated into the ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group and into Acceleration Robotics’ ROBOTCORE® Framework:  “We are excited to engage into a closer cooperation with Microchip and believe that their RISC-V FPGA SoC solutions have tremendous potential in the ROS robotics field. We’re thrilled to explore further the opportunities that RISC-V hard-cores in combination with FPGAs can bring into the robotics ecosystem”.

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.