News

China surpasses U.S. in robot density

Source: The Robot Report, December 5, 2022 [1]
China's industrial robotics market saw 243,300 installations last year, a 44% increase from the year before. South Korea reached an all-time high of 1,000 industrial robots per 10,000 employees. Singapore has seen consistent growth in recent years in the number of industrial robots.

India in the Era of ‘Silicon Diplomacy’

Source: ORF, December 6, 2022 [2]
Semiconductors have become a fulcrum for building potential technology alliances. The brief outlines ongoing diplomatic initiatives that aim to secure global supply chains. It explores India's overreliance on China, and how it can reduce that dependence in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.

Japan to open roads to autonomous vehicles in 2023

Source: The Robot Report, November 28, 2022 [3]
Japan's National Policy Agency announced that it would lift a ban preventing SAE Level 4 autonomous vehicles from operating on Japanese roads. The change in policy will allow autonomous vehicles to operate in a limited capacity in April 2023. More details on how the vehicles will be rolled out will come after a public comment period.

Mercedes-Benz and Bosch driverless parking system approved for commercial use

Source: Mercedes media, November 30, 2022 [4]
Germany's Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA) has approved their highly automated parking system for use in the P6 parking garage at Stuttgart Airport. This makes it the world's first highly automated driverless parking function (SAE Level 4)[1] to be officially approved for commercial use.

Intel pathfinder for RISC-V: New capabilities and a growing ecosystem

Source: Intel, December 1, 2022 [5]
Intel Pathfinder for RISC-V is a pre-silicon development environment that supports IP selection via testing for compatibility and performance. The new version will be released on December 12, 2022. A new Cyclone 10 GX development board will be supported in Q1'23, enabling lower cost and additional flexibility.

Lattice lets loose with new mid-range FPGA family

Source: Fierce Electronics, December 5, 2022 [6]
Lattice Semiconductor has launched the Avant line of devices with five times the density, or capacity, and 10 times more bandwidth, and 30 times higher performance than the previous architecture. The Avant family aims higher, but still leverages the industry-specific and application specific software solution stacks.

TSMC plans to make more advanced chips in US at urging of Apple

Source: Bloomberg, December 1, 2022 [7]
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. will offer advanced 4-nanometer chips when its new $12 billion plant in Arizona opens in 2024. TSMC is expected to announce the new plan when President Joe Biden and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo visit Phoenix next week.

How ROS 2 fixed a robot arm’s latency, jerky motions

Source: The Robot Report, December 5, 2022 [8]
Optics manufacturer Optimax is using the open-source Robot Operating System (ROS) platform in their freeform optics manufacturing process. A driver based on ROS 2 Control also allows for use of PickNik's admittance controller to maintain constant force during polishing.

How sensor fusion is driving vehicle autonomy forward

Source: Texas instruments, June 7, 2022 [9]
As ADAS technology extends to critical, time-sensitive applications – such as emergency braking, front-collision warning and avoidance, and blind-spot detection – combining data from multiple sensors enables reliable, real-time decisions for safer autonomous driving.

Why better mapping technology is critical to autonomous vehicles

Source: Semiconductor Engineering, December 1, 2022 [10]
Autonomous cars find the way to their destination using a number of critical technologies. Many of those technologies are not reliable or accurate today, and may not be for years to come. Unlike human drivers, autonomous vehicles need to learn how to drive, read maps, and arrive at the destination.

How semiconductor chips changed the driving experience forever and not for the better

Source: Robb Report, December 3, 2022 [11]
Some cars come loaded with as many as 3,000 semiconductors. Semiconductors are big business, as you probably know. The world turned out 78 million new cars in 2020, which would give an average of around 1,800 chips per car.

What medium and large enterprises can learn from the supercomputing revolution

Source: IT PRO, December 6, 2022 [12]
Supercomputing is leading the way with GPU acceleration and power consumption, which medium and large enterprises can emulate during digital transformation.

Papers

End-to-end timing analysis in ROS2

Source: TU Dortmund, 2022 [13]
In this paper, we provide a theoretical upper bound for the end-to-end timing of a Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2) system. We also show how to simulate a ROS2-based autonomous vehicle platform to get a lower bound for our analysis.

Source: arXiv, October 18, 2022 [14]
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.

Previous Hardware Acceleration in Robotics Newsletters

Past ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group meetings

  1. Wessling, B. (2022, December 5). IFR: China surpasses U.S. in robot density. The Robot Report. https://www.therobotreport.com/ifr-china-surpasses-u-s-in-robot-density/ ↩︎

  2. Gargeyas, A. (December 6). India in the Era of ‘Silicon Diplomacy’. ORF. https://www.orfonline.org/research/india-in-the-era-of-silicon-diplomacy/ ↩︎

  3. Wessling, B. (2022, November 28). Japan to open roads to autonomous vehicles in 2023. The Robot Report. https://www.therobotreport.com/japan-to-open-roads-to-autonomous-vehicles-in-2023/?spMailingID=80346&puid=2502618&E=2502618&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=80346 ↩︎

  4. World first: Mercedes-Benz and Bosch driverless parking system approved for commercial use. (2022, November 30). Mercedes me media. https://media.mercedes-benz.com/article/901a6b0f-0a0f-4146-8b94-0b7dec10f506 ↩︎

  5. Intel pathfinder for RISC-V: New capabilities and a growing ecosystem. (2022, December 1). Intel Pathfinder for RISC-V. https://pathfinder.intel.com/news/intel-pathfinder-for-risc-v-new-capabilities-and-a-growing-ecosystem/ ↩︎

  6. O'shea, D. (2022, December 5). Lattice lets loose with new mid-range FPGA family. Fierce Electronics. https://www.fierceelectronics.com/electronics/lattice-lets-loose-new-mid-range-fpga-family ↩︎

  7. King, I., Gurman, M., & Wu, D. (2022, December 1). TSMC plans to make more advanced chips in US at urging of Apple. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-01/tsmc-plans-to-make-more-advanced-chips-in-us-at-urging-of-apple ↩︎

  8. How ROS 2 fixed a robot arm's latency, jerky motions. (2022, December 5). The Robot Report. https://www.therobotreport.com/how-ros-2-helped-optimax-overcome-robot-arm-issues/ ↩︎

  9. How sensor fusion is driving vehicle autonomy forward. (2022, June 7). Newsroom | news.ti.com. https://news.ti.com/blog/2022/06/07/how-sensor-fusion-is-driving-vehicle-autonomy-forward?HQS=asc-null-null-adas_autobrand_da22_company-enslt-blog-AAC_1202-eu_awr&DCM=yes&dclid=COH_0PWG5_sCFcSyUQodJQMM4w ↩︎

  10. Koon, J. (2022, December 1). Why better mapping technology is critical to autonomous vehicles. Semiconductor Engineering. https://semiengineering.com/why-better-mapping-technology-is-critical-to-autonomous-vehicles/?cmid=342fb231-3a0d-47d5-8631-101cfa4c28b9 ↩︎

  11. Swithinbank, R. (2022, December 3). How semiconductor chips changed the driving experience forever—and not for the better. Robb Report. https://robbreport.com/motors/cars/why-expert-questions-semiconductor-chips-1234773171/ ↩︎

  12. Pro, I. (2022, December 6). What medium and large enterprises can learn from the supercomputing revolution. IT PRO. https://www.itpro.co.uk/infrastructure/server-storage/369644/what-medium-and-large-enterprises-can-learn-from-the ↩︎

  13. Teper, H., Gunzel, M., Ueter, N., Bruggen, F. V., & Chen, J. J. (2022). End-to-end timing analysis in ROS2. TU Dortmund. https://daes.cs.tu-dortmund.de/storages/daes-cs/r/publications/teper_rtss_2022.pdf ↩︎

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