News

Robotics and ROS 2 in the PolarFire® SoC FPGA

Source: Microchip Technology, November 22, 2022 [1]
Víctor Mayoral-Vilches from Acceleration Robotics will discuss the results of our joint effort to enable the latest ROS 2 distribution (Humble Hawksbill) in the PolarFire® SoC boards. Víctor will also discuss how most roboticists today build ROS graphs in a CPU-centric manner. He will explain the basic principles of ROS 2 and the process required to enable ROS 2 with the official BSP.

Outdoor mobile robot shipments 'to hit 350,000 by 2030'

Source: ZAWYA, November 22, 2022 [2]
The global market for outdoor mobile robots will grow from 40,000 units in 2021 to 350,000 by 2030 at a CAGR of 27%, according to ABI Research. Labour shortages, focus on workplace safety, and rising costs have led companies to deploy robotics automation across various sectors.

No, autonomous vehicles aren’t dead

Source: The Robot Report, November 16, 2022 [3]
After Argo AI shut down, many have already signed the death certificate for autonomous vehicles. Some of the industry's leading players have incredible momentum at the moment. Waymo recently expanded its robotaxi service in downtown Phoenix to include airport pickups and drop-offs.

University of Texas to study how people interact with robots in public

Source: The Robot Report, November 21, 2022 [4]
The research will involve deploying a fleet of quadrupeds on campus. The first deployments will start in early 2023, and members of the community will be able to order supplies via an app. They're hoping to get a better understanding of how to create robots that can co-exist with humans in public. The team's research will build on a six-year project that kicked off in September 2021.

NVIDIA announces financial results for third quarter fiscal 2023

Source: NVIDIA Newsroom, November 16, 2022 [5]
Revenue for the third quarter ended October 30, 2022, of $5.93 billion, down 17% from a year ago and 12% from the previous quarter. NVIDIA returned to shareholders $3.75 billion in share repurchases and cash dividends.

Arm relishes competition from open-chip architectures

Source: Korea JoongAng Daily, November 17, 2022 [6]
RISC-V, an open-standard processor, is good for the market, says Arm executive. Arm cores are central processing units found in almost every phone and increasing used in PCs and servers. Arm is currently in a dispute with Qualcomm over the licensing of technology.

RISC-V is far from being an alternative to x86 and arm in HPC

Source: HPCwire, November 18, 2022 [7]
One of the original RISC-V designers predicted that the open architecture will surpass rival chip architectures in performance. RISC is an open chip architecture, which is free to license. SiPearl CEO Philippe Notton said RISC was not yet a viable go-to market option for high-performance computing.

Sharpen your edge AI and robotics skills with the NVIDIA Jetson Nano developer kit

Source: NVIDIA Technical Blog, November 18, 2022 [8]
The NVIDIA Jetson Nano is a low-cost, entry-level AI computer for the embedded and edge AI market. The Nano can run multiple neural networks in parallel for applications like image classification, object detection, segmentation, and speech processing. It's an easy-to-use platform that runs in as little as five watts.

Papers

An analysis of robotics operating systems (ROS 2) in real-time systems

Source: International Journal of Advance and Applied Research , August , 2022 [9]
Robot Operating System (ROS) has developed an opensource lib library it contains a tool that aids the building of robotic applications. This paper aims to analyze the Real-time performance of ROS 2 and also aims to identify the problems and solutions regarding the real-time constraints.

Wheel-SLAM: Simultaneous localization and terrain mapping using one wheel-mounted IMU

Source: arXiv, November 6, 2022 [10]
Inertial measurement units (IMUs) play an important role because they can perceive the full motion state of the vehicle independently. However, they suffer from accumulative error due to inherent noise and bias instability. We propose exploiting this to achieve simultaneous localization and nmapping (SLAM) with only one IMU.

Previous Hardware Acceleration in Robotics Newsletters

Past ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group meetings

  1. https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/4011131/C6110DBDB0D761F143573AD38A2E1BD8?partnerref=social1 ↩︎

  2. Outdoor mobile robot shipments 'to hit 350,000 by 2030'. (2022, November 22). ZAWYA . https://www.zawya.com/en/business/manufacturing/outdoor-mobile-robot-shipments-to-hit-350-000-by-2030-baypgc2w ↩︎

  3. Crowe, S. (2022, November 16). No, autonomous vehicles aren’t dead. The Robot Report. https://www.therobotreport.com/no-autonomous-vehicles-arent-dead/?spMailingID=79720&puid=2502618&E=2502618&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=79720 ↩︎

  4. Wessling, B. (2022, November 21). University of Texas to study how people interact with robots in public. The Robot Report. https://www.therobotreport.com/university-of-texas-to-study-how-people-interact-with-robots-in-public/ ↩︎

  5. NVIDIA announces financial results for third quarter fiscal 2023. (2022, November 16). NVIDIA Newsroom. https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financial-results-for-third-quarter-fiscal-2023 ↩︎

  6. Arm relishes competition from open-chip architectures. (2022, November 17). Korea JoongAng Daily. https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2022/11/17/business/tech/Korea-Arm-chipmaker/20221117182714791.html ↩︎

  7. Shah, A. (2022, November 18). RISC-V is far from being an alternative to x86 and arm in HPC. HPCwire. https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/11/18/risc-v-is-far-from-being-an-alternative-to-x86-and-arm-in-hpc/ ↩︎

  8. Black, J. (2022, November 18). Sharpen your edge AI and robotics skills with the NVIDIA Jetson Nano developer kit. NVIDIA Technical Blog. https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/sharpen-your-edge-ai-and-robotics-skills-with-the-nvidia-jetson-nano-developer-kit/ ↩︎

  9. Parthiban, S. (2022, August). An analysis of robotics operating systems (ROS 2) in real-time systems. International Journal of Advance and Applied Research . https://ijaar.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/0906091..pdf ↩︎

  10. Yibin, W., Jian, K., Xiaoji, N., Behley, J., Klingbeil, L., & Kuhlmann, H. (2022, November 6). Wheel-SLAM: Simultaneous localization and terrain mapping using one wheel-mounted IMU. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03174 ↩︎