News

Robot sales hit record high for 3rd straight quarter

Source: The Robot Report, August 29, 2022 [1]
North American companies bought 12,305 robots in Q2 2022, a 6% increase from Q1 of 2022. During Q2, 59% of sales came from automotive customers. Unit orders increased 13% in the food and consumer goods industry over the same quarter in 2021.

AMD smartNICs to meld ASICs, FPGAs, Arm cores

Source: The Register, August 27, 2022 [2]
AMD will combine FPGAs and smartNICs to build a better infrastructure processor for the cloud, datacenter, and telco network. AMD acquired Xilinx and Pensando earlier this year. Embedded processors offer a more flexible alternative, but suffer from many of the same limitations as the CPU.

Nvidia will unveil next-gen GPU architecture in September

Source: The Register, August 25, 2022 [3]
Graphics giant Nvidia saw revenue decline in the quarter ended July 31. Company forecasts a further decline due to weakening demand in the gaming market. CEO Jensen Huang plans to unveil architecture for next-generation consumer GPU, Lovelace, at its GTC conference in Septemebr.

The first industrial robot: why it failed

Source: Robotics Business Review, October 14, 2012 [4]
50 years ago, Joesph Engelberger started Unimation, Inc., the world's first industrial robot manufacturer. Pullman, developer of the famous railroad car, put up $3M for a 51% share in Unimation. The company wouldn't turn a profit for fifteen years.

Berkeley researchers announce DayDreamer algorithm

Source: The Robot Report, August 23, 2022 [5]
DayDreamer is a reinforcement-learning algorithm created by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. It can teach a quadruped to walk in an hour and a robotic arm how to pick and place objects in 10 hours using just camera images. The algorithm uses a world model to learn complex behaviors in the real world.

Alibaba Cloud launches RISC-V developer platform for edge SoCs

Source: The Register, August 25, 2022 [6]
China's Alibaba has released a development platform to help chip designers. Wujian 600 is aimed at the creation of edge SoCs using the RISC-V instruction-set architecture. Platform was created by another Alibaba subsidiary, its wholly owned semiconductor business T-Head.

RISC-V universe grows with new GPUs, CPUs, and Development Kits

Source: allaboutcircuits, August 28, 2022 [7]
More companies continue to leverage RISC-V, a free open source instruction set architecture, to push innovation in GPUs and real-time CPU devices.

KPMG study predicts accelerated boom in auto chip sales as congress considers incentives

Source: Forbes, July 26, 2022 [8]
U.S. House and Senate are expected to vote on a measure providing billions in incentives including tax breaks to the semiconductor chip industry. KPMG now expects global sales of automotive semiconductors to reach $200 billion by the mid-2030's.

Researchers at Seoul National University developed a deep learning framework to improve a robotic sketching agent’s skills

Source: MarkTechPost, August 27, 2022 [9]
Deep learning algorithms have produced amazing results in various fields, including the arts. Researchers have developed a framework that displays drawing as a sequential choice process rather than creating a generative model that creates artistic works by generating certain pixel patterns. It can independently create its own sketching techniques over time by learning from mistakes.

Three Core Benefits of Simulation for Software-Hardware Project Development

Source: Fresh Consulting, August 23, 2022 [10]
Using simulation for software-hardware project development early and consistently is essential. It allows us to jumpstart software development, decrease hardware integration time, and increase system reliability. At Fresh, we use simulation to help us design and build systems involving custom combinations of hardware and software.

Upgrading multi-GPU interconnectivity with the third-generation NVIDIA NVSwitch

Source: NVIDIA Technical Blog, August 25, 2022 [11]
The third-generation NVIDIA NVSwitch is designed to provide connectivity within a node or to GPUs external to the node for the NVLink Switch System. It also incorporates hardware acceleration for collective operations with multicast and NVIDIA Scalable Hierarchical Aggregation and Reduction Protocol (SHARP).

Inside NVIDIA Grace CPU: NVIDIA amps up superchip engineering for HPC and AI

Source: NVIDIA Technical Blog, August 26, 2022 [12]
Grace CPU is the first data center CPU developed by NVIDIA. It has 72 Armv9 CPU cores that implement Arm Scalable Vector Extensions version two (SVE2) instruction set. Cores also incorporate virtualization extensions with nested virtualization capability and S-EL2 support.

Papers

Model-driven engineering and simulation of industrial robots with ROS

Source: SciTePress, 2022 [13]
We have developed a model-driven engineering approach for the modular composition and simulation of complex ensembles of industrial robots based on the Robot Operating System (ROS). The approach consists of a domain-specific profile for the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and a modelto-text transformation.

Dynamic connection handling for scalable robotic systems using ROS2

Source: DIVA, June 9, 2022 [14]
Volvo GTO has started investigating a possible implementation of an autonomous-transport robot system for material delivery in production environments. This thesis investigates possible improvements for the system by adding a dynamic connection handling, which allows robots to connect and disconnect under the system's run time.

Spiker: an FPGA-optimized Hardware accelerator for Spiking Neural Networks

Source: ResearchGate, July 5, 2022 [15]
Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) are an emerging type of biologically plausible and efficient Artificial Neural Network (ANN). This work presents a hardware accelerator for a SNN for high-performance inference. The accelerator is targeting the Xilinx Artix-7 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA).

Previous Hardware Acceleration in Robotics Newsletters

Past ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group meetings

  1. Wessling, B. (2022, August 29). Robot sales hit record high for 3rd straight quarter. The Robot Report. https://www.therobotreport.com/robot-sales-hit-record-high-for-3rd-straight-quarter/ ↩︎

  2. Mann, T. (2022, August 27). AMD smartNICs to combine ASICs, FPGAs, arm cores. The Register: Enterprise Technology News and Analysis. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/27/amd_smartnics/ ↩︎

  3. Robinson, D. (2022, August 25). Nvidia revenue hit by falling gamer GPU sales. The Register: Enterprise Technology News and Analysis. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/25/nvidia_q2_2023/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_content=article ↩︎

  4. The first industrial robot: Why it failed. (2012, October 14). Robotics Business Review. https://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/manufacturing/the_first_industrial_robot_why_it_failed/ ↩︎

  5. Wessling, B. (2022, August 23). Berkeley researchers announce daydreamer algorithm. The Robot Report. https://www.therobotreport.com/berkeley-researchers-announce-daydreamer-algorithm/?spMailingID=74328&puid=2502618&E=2502618&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=74328 ↩︎

  6. Robinson, D. (2022, August 25). Alibaba launches RISC-V developer platform for edge socs. The Register: Enterprise Technology News and Analysis. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/25/alibaba_riscv_developer_platform/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_content=article ↩︎

  7. Oyenkule, A. (2022, August 28). RISC-V universe grows with new GPUs, CPUs, and Development Kits. allaboutcircuits. https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/risc-v-universe-grows-with-new-gpus-cpus-and-development-kits/ ↩︎

  8. Garsten, E. (2022, July 26). KPMG study predicts accelerated boom in auto chip sales as congress considers incentives. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/edgarsten/2022/07/26/kpmg-study-predicts-accelerated-boom-in-auto-chip-sales-as-congress-considers-incentives/amp/ ↩︎

  9. Baraik, P. (2022, August 27). Researchers at Seoul national University developed a deep learning framework to improve a robotic sketching agent's skills. MarkTechPost. https://www.marktechpost.com/2022/08/27/researchers-at-seoul-national-university-developed-a-deep-learning-framework-to-improve-a-robotic-sketching-agents-skills/ ↩︎

  10. Soesbe, J. (2022, August 23). Three core benefits of simulation for software-hardware project development. Fresh Consulting. https://www.freshconsulting.com/insights/blog/three-core-benefits-of-simulation-for-software-hardware-project-development/ ↩︎

  11. Eassa, A., Ishii, A., & Wells, R. (2022, August 25). Upgrading Multi-GPU Interconnectivity with the third-generation NVIDIA NVSwitch. NVIDIA Technical Blog. https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/upgrading-multi-gpu-interconnectivity-with-the-third-generation-nvidia-nvswitch/ ↩︎

  12. Evans, J., & Eassa, A. (2022, August 26). Inside NVIDIA grace CPU: NVIDIA amps up Superchip engineering for HPC and AI. NVIDIA Technical Blog. https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/inside-nvidia-grace-cpu-nvidia-amps-up-superchip-engineering-for-hpc-and-ai/ ↩︎

  13. Hoppe, N., & Hoffschulte, J. (2022). Model-driven engineering and simulation of industrial robots with ROS. SciTePress . https://www.scitepress.org/Papers/2022/108836/108836.pdf ↩︎

  14. Dust, L. K., & Persson, E. (2022, June 9). Dynamic connection handling for scalable robotic systems using ROS2. DIVA. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1666823&dswid=9529 ↩︎

  15. Carpegna, A., Savino, A., & Carlo, S. D. (2022, July 5). Spiker: an FPGA-optimized Hardware accelerator for Spiking Neural Networks. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alessio-Carpegna/publication/357953311_Spiker_an_FPGA-optimized_Hardware_acceleration_for_Spiking_Neural_Networks/links/62972fc955273755ebc79668/Spiker-an-FPGA-optimized-Hardware-acceleration-for-Spiking-Neural-Networks.pdf ↩︎