News

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

Source: Acceleration Robotics, December 1, 2022 [1]
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.

REP 2008, ROS 2 Hardware acceleration architecture and conventions - final review and draft vote

Source: Acceleration Robotics, November 28, 2022 [2]
The ROS Enhancement Proposal (REP) 2008 aims to describe the architectural pillars and conventions required to introduce hardware acceleration in ROS 2 in a vendor-neutral, scalable and technology-agnostic manner. The Hardware Acceleration group will vote on it next December 13th during the upcoming meeting.

GPU shipments saw biggest nosedive since noughties recession

Source: The Register, November 23, 2022 [3]
GPU shipments in the third quarter saw their biggest drop since the Great Recession. The sector has seen an overall tumble in sales over the past several months. Third-quarter GPU shipments for PCs decreased 25.1 percent year-over-year and 10.3 percent from the previous quarter.

Xilinx's FPGA are getting price increases from January 9th

Source: OC3D, November 25, 2022 [4]
Xilinx's FPGA products will see price increases from 8%-25%, with AMD citing increasing manufacturing costs and supply chain investments. AMD's price increases for Xilinx products will come into effect on January 9th 2023. The chip shortage is still in effect outside of the semiconductor industry.

MIT researchers build swarms of assembling robots

Source: The Robot Report, November 29, 2022 [5]
MIT researchers have created robots that are made up of the same components they use to build structures. These robots can move independently in large numbers to make those structures. MIT's voxel-robot can also decide how many robots it needs to build a structure.

Porting CUDA applications to run on AMD GPUs

Source: HPCwire, November 28, 2022 [6]
As organizations move to using open source and open standard solutions, developers need the ability to write code once and be able to use it on multiple architectures. AMD developed a porting solution that allows developers to port code that is based on NVIDIA's CUDA API to run on AMD GPUs.

Police can use robots that kill, San Francisco board decides

Source: pantagraph, November 29, 2022 [7]
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is divided on support for law enforcement. The debate recalled outrage over the use of military gear by police during protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Civil rights advocates opposed the proposal, saying it would lead to further militarization.

Why Tesla’s Optimus is a big step on the way to AGI

Source: Medium, November 27, 2022 [8]
There's been a bit of controversy around Google's AI, LaMDA. One of its ethical team claimed that this chatbot is conscious, and it has basic human rights.

Source: Ansys, November 11, 2022 [9]
A majority of drivers prefer improvements to driver assist systems over fully autonomous experiences. When asked, 85% said they were fearful or unsure of self-driving technology. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) continue to advance autonomous vehicle technologies. AVs offer transformative safety opportunities for all vehicle occupants.

Australia's place in the semiconductor world - Barriers to bringing wafer production home

Source: Australian Manufacturing Forum, November 29, 2022 [10]
Australia's place in the semiconductor world is defined by its reliance on overseas fabrication, writes Andrew McLellan from Bluechiip, an Australian company specialising in high-performance semiconductors.

Bridgestone starts a proof of concept for using soft-robot hands to perform piece-picking at logistics sites

Source: AZoRobotics, November 28, 2022 [11]
Bridgestone Corporation has commenced a Proof of Concept (PoC) for using soft-robot hands to automatically perform piece-picking, the process of picking and transporting individual items. Looking ahead, the company will seek to achieve small-scale commercialization during the next Mid Term Business Plan (2024-2026).

Papers

FPGA hardware acceleration for feature-based relative navigation applications

Source: arXiv, October 18, 2022 [12]
A Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based embedded architecture is developed to accelerate estimation of relative pose between the point-clouds, aided by image features. The proposed embedded solution is a hardware/software co-design that evaluates the OLTAE computations for high-speed state estimation.

Hardware Acceleration of Data Distribution Service (DDS) for automotive communication and computing

Source: IEEE Xplore, September 15, 2022 [13]
The increasing complexity of vehicles is driving a technological shift in the design of software in the automotive industry. A significant part of the functionalities of a powerful middleware like DDS can be effectively implemented through hardware accelerators. This allows to build cost-effective solutions suitable for next-generation automotive systems.

Previous Hardware Acceleration in Robotics Newsletters

  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #35 - Robotics and ROS 2 in the PolarFire® SoC FPGA, Outdoor mobile robot shipments 'to hit 350,000 by 2030', No, autonomous vehicles aren’t dead and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #34 - ROS2 HAWG #13, Robotics markets: up, down or just sideways?, Nvidia offers new advanced chip for China that meets U.S. export controls and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #33 - ROS 2 HAWG - meeting #12, Why are some companies still short semiconductor chips when others are swimming in them? and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #32 - Acceleration Robotics expands to India and takes over TechnoYantra to grow in Asia, An open architecture for hardware acceleration in robotics and ROS 2 - ROSCon 2022 and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #31 - ROS 2 HAWG #12 meeting, Google announces new open-source OS for RISC-V chips, How digital twin technology can bridge America’s chip manufacturing gap and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #30 - The semiconductor industry is ‘near its limit,’ says Nvidia CEO, Intel and Google collaborate on computing ASIC for data centers and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #29 - 2022 Hardware acceleration report in robotics, ROS 2 HAWG #12, REP-2008 - ROS 2 hardware acceleration architecture and conventions and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #28 - ROS2 HAWG #11, About Tesla's Optimus robot brain, a robotics hardware and software computer architecture perspective and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #27 - Acceleration Robotics announce and open sources ROBOTCORE®, Acceleration Robotics, AMD partner to design robotic compute architectures with ROS and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #26 - ROS2 HAWG #11 meeting, Acceleration Robotics collaborating with AMD to design next-generation robotic compute architectures with ROS and more

Past ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group meetings

  1. https://news.accelerationrobotics.com/acceleration-robotics-and-microchip-collaborate-to-bring-ros-2-to-risc-v-fpga-socs/ ↩︎

  2. https://news.accelerationrobotics.com/rep-2008-ros-2-hardware-acceleration-architecture-and-conventions/ ↩︎

  3. Martin, D. (2022, November 23). GPU shipments saw biggest nosedive since noughties recession. The Register: Enterprise Technology News and Analysis. https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/23/gpu_shipments_dive/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_content=article ↩︎

  4. Campbell, M. (2022, November 25). AMD's increasing Xilinx's FPGA prices by as much as 25% in 2023. OC3D. https://overclock3d.net/news/misc_hardware/amd_s_increasing_xilinx_s_fpga_prices_by_as_much_as_25_in_2023/1 ↩︎

  5. Wessling, B. (2022, November 29). MIT researchers build swarms of assembling robots. The Robot Report. https://www.therobotreport.com/mit-researchers-build-swarms-of-assembling-robots/ ↩︎

  6. Ware, A. (2022, November 28). Porting CUDA applications to run on AMD GPUs. HPCwire. https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/11/28/porting-cuda-applications-to-run-on-amd-gpus/ ↩︎

  7. Press, A. (2022, November 29). Police can use robots that kill, San Francisco board decides. pantagraph.com. https://pantagraph.com/news/national/police-can-use-robots-that-kill-san-francisco-board-decides/article_06409e92-18f4-5097-b0a0-19857e889b80.html ↩︎

  8. Fazekas, L. (2022, November 27). Why Tesla’s Optimus is a big step on the way to AGI. Medium. https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/why-teslas-optimus-is-a-big-step-on-the-way-to-agi-548abb0343f3 ↩︎

  9. Autonomous vehicles: How simulation drives the top automotive trends. (2022, November 11). Ansys . https://www.ansys.com/blog/automotive-top-ten-trend-autonomous ↩︎

  10. Reporter, S. (2022, November 29). Australia's place in the semiconductor world - Barriers to bringing wafer production home - Australian manufacturing forum. Australian Manufacturing Forum. https://www.aumanufacturing.com.au/australias-place-in-the-semiconductor-world-barriers-to-bringing-wafer-production-home ↩︎

  11. Thomson, L. (2022, November 28). Bridgestone starts a proof of concept for using soft-robot hands to perform piece-picking at logistics sites. AZoRobotics.com. https://www.azorobotics.com/News.aspx?newsID=13440 ↩︎

  12. Bhaskara, R. R., & Majji, M. (2022, October 18). FPGA hardware acceleration for feature-based relative navigation applications. arXiv.org e-Print archive. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.09481.pdf ↩︎

  13. Scordino, C., Mariño, A. G., & Fons, F. (2022, September 15). Hardware Acceleration of Data Distribution Service (DDS) for automotive communication and computing. IEEE Xplore. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=9915572 ↩︎