News

2022 Hardware acceleration report in robotics

Source: Acceleration Robotics, October 14, 2022 [1]
The 2022 Hardware Acceleration Report in Robotics 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.

ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group #12

Source: Acceleration Robotics, October 16, 2022 [2]
Join the 12th meeting of the ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group to discuss updates from IROS2022, ROSCon2022, the Robotic Processing Unit, the RobotPerf project and more!

REP-2008 - ROS 2 hardware acceleration architecture and conventions

Source: Github, October 13, 2022 [3]
This REP proposal describes the architectural pillars and conventions required to introduce hardware acceleration in ROS 2 in a scalable and technology-agnostic manner. A set of categories meant to classify supported hardware acceleration solutions is provided. Inclusion in a category is based on the fulfillment of the hardware acceleration capabilities.

[REP-2014] Benchmarking performance in ROS 2

Source: Github, October 13, 2022 [4]
This REP describes some principles and guidelines for benchmarking performance in ROS 2

Acceleration Robotics adds Vijay Janapa Reddi to its Board of Advisors

Source: Acceleration Robotics, October 10, 2022 [5]
We are delighted to announce that Professor Vijay Janapa Reddi from Harvard University has joined Acceleration Robotics Board of Advisors.

World robotics report: “all-time high” with half a million robots installed in one year

Source: IFR, October 13, 2022 [6]
The new World Robotics report shows an all-time high of 517,385 new industrial robots installed in 2021 in factories around the world. This represents a growth rate of 31% year-on-year and exceeds the pre-pandemic record of robot installation in 2018 by 22%. Today, the stock of operational robots around the globe hits a new record of about 3.5 million units.”

ROSCon 2022, An open architecture for Hardware Acceleration in ROS 2

Source: ROSCon, October 21, 2022 [7]
Come join us at ROSCon2022 in Japan to speak about hardware acceleration in robotics and systems architecture.
ROSCon 2022 will be held at the Kyoto International Conference Center in Kyoto, Japan on October 19th through the 21st, immediately before IROS 2022. ROSCon 2022 is a chance for ROS developers of all levels, beginner to expert, to spend an extraordinary two days learning from and networking with the ROS community. Get tips and tricks from experts and meet and share ideas with fellow developers.

Intel details FPGA roadmap

Source: Network World, October 7, 2022 [8]
Intel is taking its FGPA lineup beyond the data center and extending its Agilex products to remote, edge computing, and embedded systems.

Intel to Take on AMD’s Xilinx with Future Edge FPGAs

Source: Electronic Design, October 5, 2022 [9]
Intel is increasing the competitive pressure on AMD's Xilinx with plans to start selling field-programmable gate arrays. FPGAs are special-purpose chips that can be reconfigured for specific workloads. They're aimed at industrial, automotive, communications, consumer and other markets.

More chipmakers report falling revenue as market braces for tough year

Source: The Register, October 7, 2022 [10]
Samsung is the latest to warn of reversing fortunes in its earnings guidance. AMD has also just warned investors that its revenue for the third quarter is likely to be $5.6 billion, a drop of 16 percent from the $6.7 billion figure it was previously predicting.

Medical Microinstruments introduces even smaller robotic instruments for complex ‘supermicrosurgery’

Source: Robotics & Automation News, October 9, 2022 [11]
Medical Microinstruments has launched its new Supermicro NanoWrist instruments for use with the Symani Surgical System. The new supermicro needle holder and dilator were recently used in clinical procedures in Zürich, Florence and Salzburg.

Papers

Autonomous Propulsion for a GPR-UGV

Source: DiVa, August 18, 2022 [12]
This thesis presents the research and development behind the integration of an autonomous propulsion system for a four-wheeled Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) measurement unit, previously requiring manual operation. In order to ease the administration of the complex new system, Robot Operating System (ROS) 2 was used as middleware, where an implementation of Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) 3D-SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) served to secure precise localization of the Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and mapping of its environment. This, with the ultimate goal of enabling accurate survey execution along paths optimized for various dynamic indoor- and outdoor environments.

FPGA-based acceleration of time series similarity prediction: From cloud to edge

Source: ACM, August 12, 2022 [13]
FA-LAMP is an FPGA-accelerated implementation of the Learned Approximate Matrix Profile (LAMP) algorithm. It predicts the correlation between streaming data sampled in real-time and a representative time series dataset used for training. On edge devices, it integrates accelerated computation as close as possible to sensors, eliminating the need to transmit and store data in the cloud. FA-LAMP can execute multiple LAMP models on the same board, allowing simultaneous processing of incoming data from multiple data sources across a network. This work investigates the challenges and limitations of deploying CNNs on FPGAs using the Xilinx Deep Learning Processor Unit (DPU).

Previous Hardware Acceleration in Robotics Newsletters

Past ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group meetings

  1. https://news.accelerationrobotics.com/2022-hardware-acceleration-report-in-robotics/ ↩︎

  2. https://www.linkedin.com/events/ros2hardwareaccelerationworking6987254580191354880/comments/ ↩︎

  3. https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rep/pull/324#issuecomment-1278195396 ↩︎

  4. https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rep/pull/364 ↩︎

  5. https://news.accelerationrobotics.com/acceleration-robotics-welcomes-vijay-janapa-reddi-as-an-advisor/ ↩︎

  6. IFR. (2022, October 13). World robotics report: “all-time high” with half a million robots installed in one year. IFR International Federation of Robotics. https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/wr-report-all-time-high-with-half-a-million-robots-installed ↩︎

  7. https://roscon.ros.org/2022/ ↩︎

  8. Patrizio, A. (2022, October 7). Intel details FPGA roadmap. Network World. https://www.networkworld.com/article/3675956/intel-details-fpga-roadmap.html ↩︎

  9. Morra, J. (2022, October 5). Intel to take on AMD’s Xilinx with future edge FPGAs. Electronic Design. https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded-revolution/article/21251986/electronic-design-intel-to-take-on-amds-xilinx-with-future-edge-fpgas ↩︎

  10. Robinson, D. (2022, October 7). Chip market set for a bumpy year ahead, or is that two? The Register: Enterprise Technology News and Analysis. https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/07/chipmaker_falling_revenue/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_content=article ↩︎

  11. Allinson, M. (2022, October 9). Medical Microinstruments introduces even smaller robotic instruments for complex ‘supermicrosurgery’. Robotics & Automation News. https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2022/10/09/medical-microinstruments-introduces-even-smaller-robotic-instruments-for-complex-supermicrosurgery/55103/ ↩︎

  12. Eskilsson, F. W. (2022, August 18). Autonomous Propulsion for a GPR-UGV. DiVa. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1679774/FULLTEXT01.pdf ↩︎

  13. Kalantar, A., Zimmerman, Z., & Brisk, P. (2022, August 12). FPGA-based acceleration of time series similarity prediction: From cloud to edge. ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3555810 ↩︎