News

ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group #12 meeting

Source: Acceleration Robotics, October 16, 2022 [1]
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!

Google announces new open-source OS for RISC-V chips

Source: allaboutcircuits, October 21, 2022 [2]
Using a new Rust-based operating system, Google aims to secure ambient machine learning on embedded hardware.

How digital twin technology can bridge America’s chip manufacturing gap

Source: Fortune, October 26, 2022 [3]
In September, the Department of Commerce announced $50 billion in subsidies for chip production in the U.S. New restrictions were placed on China's ability to purchase and manufacture high-end chips used in military applications. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are fueling investment in the semiconductor industry.

XPENG prepares its own robotaxi fleet, flying car, and robot

Source: Internet of Things News, October 25, 2022 [4]
Xpeng's G9 SUV becomes first mass-produced commercial vehicle to pass government-led Autonomous Driving Closed-field Test. The G9 will be used for XPENG's robotaxi fleet, the world's first fully-electric flying car, and an AI-powered robot.

With robots involved in many aspects of human life now, several questions arise

Source: Business News, October 24, 2022 [5]
The world is changing once again forever. The invasion of robots is right around the corner, and it heralds yet another powerful chapter in the upcoming artificial intelligence revolution. It is now reported that over 3.5 million industrial robots are installed already, which is more than the population of every US city except New York and Los Angeles, according to the International Federation of Robotics.

Chip challenges in the metaverse

Source: Semiconductor Engineering, October 25, 2022 [6]
The metaverse is pushing the limits of chip design, despite uncertainty about how much raw horsepower these devices ultimately will require to deliver an immersive blend of augmented, virtual, and mixed reality.

Ventana micro brings RISC-V into the data center

Source: Forbes, October 24, 2022 [7]
Company hopes to match or even exceed x86 and Arm performance for data center infrastructure and applications. The rise of RISC-V as a viable and flexible technology is undeniably helped by the open-source platform's excellent fit as a CPU in a multi-chiplet architecture.

Open-source fleet management tools for autonomous mobile robots

Source: NVIDIA Technical Blog, October 19, 2022 [8]
At ROSCon 2022, NVIDIA announced the newest Isaac ROS software release, Developer Preview (DP) 2. This release includes new cloud– and edge-to-robot task management and monitoring software for autonomous mobile robot (AMR) fleets, as well as additional features for ROS 2 developers.

Papers

DeLiBA: An open-source hardware/software framework for the development of Linux block I/O accelerators

Source: Embedded Systems and Applications Group, 2022 [9]
"DeLiBA" is a framework that allows development of software components of the I/O stack in user instead of kernel space. In its current form it achieves 10% higher throughput and up to 2.3x faster I/Os per second for a proof-of-concept Ceph accelerator.

ReconfROS: An approach for accelerating ROS nodes on reconfigurable SoCs

Source: sciencedirect, September 21, 2022 [10]
An approach to integrate reconfigurable SoCs into the well known Robot Operating System (ROS) called ReconfROS. Our method allows to implement hardware-accelerated algorithms on FPGAs and integrates them directly into the ROS ecosystem. Evaluations show a three times performance improvement combined with a 15 times reduction of energy per frame.

Previous Hardware Acceleration in Robotics Newsletters

Past ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group meetings

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

  2. Patel, D. (2022, October 21). Google announces new open-source OS for RISC-V chips. allaboutcircuits. https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/google-announces-new-open-source-os-for-risc-v-chips/ ↩︎

  3. Rust, C. (2022, October 26). How digital twin technology can bridge America’s chip manufacturing gap. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2022/10/26/ai-digital-twins-us-america-chips-manufacturing-gap-tech-semiconductors-chris-rust/ ↩︎

  4. Daws, R. (2022, October 25). XPENG prepares its own robotaxi fleet, flying car, and robot. Internet of Things News. https://www.iottechnews.com/news/2022/oct/25/xpeng-prepares-robotaxi-fleet-flying-car-robot/ ↩︎

  5. With robots involved in many aspects of human life now, several questions arise. (2022, October 24). Business News. https://www.financialexpress.com/opinion/with-robots-involved-in-many-aspects-of-human-life-now-several-questions-arise/2730010/ ↩︎

  6. Baca, M. C., & Sperling, E. (2022, October 25). Chip challenges in the Metaverse. Semiconductor Engineering. https://semiengineering.com/chip-challenges-in-the-metaverse/?cmid=57e13b92-bc16-4048-8178-fc93635d8928 ↩︎

  7. Freund, K. (2022, October 24). Ventana micro brings RISC-V into the data center. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlfreund/2022/10/24/ventana-micro-brings-risc-v-into-the-data-center/?sh=5cd1ae5b3210 ↩︎

  8. Andrews, G. (2022, October 19). Open-source fleet management tools for autonomous mobile robots. NVIDIA Technical Blog. https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/open-source-fleet-management-tools-for-autonomous-mobile-robots/ ↩︎

  9. Khan, B., Heinz, C., & Koch, A. (2022). DeLiBA: An open-source hardware/software framework for the development of Linux block I/O accelerators. Embedded Systems and Applications Group. https://www.esa.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/assets/publications/materials/2022/2022_FPL_BK.pdf ↩︎

  10. Eislodt, M., Flottmann, M., Gaal, J., Hinderink, S., Vana, J., Tassemeier, M., Rothmann, M., Wiemann, T., & Porrmann, M. (2022, September 21). ReconfROS: An approach for accelerating ROS nodes on reconfigurable SoCs. sciencedirect. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0141933122001892 ↩︎