News

Robot sales on track to hit a new high in 2022

Source: The Robot Report, December 21, 2022 [1]
Industrial robot sales are on track to reach record highs for the second year in a row. North American companies purchased 35,804 units valued at $1.875 billion in the first nine months of the year. Sales in the automotive industry drove the record-breaking numbers in Q1 and Q2 of 2022.

Where all the semiconductor investments are going

Source: Semiconductor Engineering, December 18, 2022 [2]
The build-out of a duplicate supply chain that can guarantee capacity and essential electronic components is the most concentrated and costly technology buildout ever during a time of relative peace. It is raising concerns about talent shortages, duplicative inefficiencies, and a potential glut at some point in the future.

North American robot sales on track for another record year for 2022

Source: Robotics & Automation News, December 22, 2022 [3]
North American robot sales in the first nine months of 2022 reached record levels, with all indications pointing to 2022 ending with the highest number of robots sold in a year for the second year in a row.

RISC-V pushes into the mainstream

Source: Semiconductor Engineering, December 21, 2022 [4]
RISC-V cores are beginning to show up in heterogeneous SoCs and packages. They are being used for everything from accelerators and extra processing cores to security applications. The chip industry is shifting from monolithic, one-vendor SoCs to heterogeneous, multi-chip advanced packaging.

Ventana RISC-V CPUs beating next generation Intel Sapphire rapids

Source: SemiAnalysis, December 26, 2022 [5]
This report will include an overview of efforts and/or cores from the 13 companies listed above. We will focus on high-level items such as go-to-market and low-level details related to cores. The overviews of the cores, where we were able to get the data, include the ISA level, pipeline stage count, in-order vs. out-of-order, issue #, privilege mode, SMP/SMT Support, TCM instructions/data, TCM size, I$, D$, L2, L3, and MMU.

Collaborative robots. Co-operative robots. What’s the difference?

Source: Robotics & Automation News, December 25, 2022 [6]
Collaborative robots, also commonly known as cobots, refer to robots that work side-by-side with human operators. Unlike industrial robots that are separated from human operators, cobots share the same working space as humans.

Centralized radar architecture improves perception capabilities

Source: Electronic Design, December 21, 2022 [7]
Ambarella's centralized 4D imaging radar architecture enhances perception to help improve safety of autonomous vehicles.

Why Europe struggles with US export controls on China

Source: The Diplomat, December 27, 2022 [8]
In October, the U.S. passed sweeping new export controls on China. It has not been as easy for the United States to gain buy-in as some in Washington expected.

How cloud is assisting emergence of robotics as a service in the region

Source: Gulf Business, December 21, 2022 [9]
The ability to move on-demand services for robotic assistance to a cloud platform will boost demand from SMBs in the region, explains Doaa Sulaiman, robotics director, Proven Robotics

Papers

FastCycle: A message sharing framework for modular automated driving systems

Source: arXiv, November 28, 2022 [10]
This paper presents FastCycle as a lightweight multi-threaded zero-copy messaging broker to meet the requirements of a high fidelity automated driving system in terms of modularity, real-time performance and security. It is an open source project and its implementation and comparisons with other frameworks are open source.

Skill-based design of dependable robotic architectures

Source: ScienceDirect, November 30, 2022 [11]
The executive layer links high-level tasks with low-level processing, and is generally responsible for the robustness or the fault-tolerance of the overall system. In this paper, we propose a development process for such an executive layer that emphasizes on the dependability of this layer.

Previous Hardware Acceleration in Robotics Newsletters

Past ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group meetings

  1. Wessling, B. (2022, December 21). Robot sales on track to hit a new high in 2022. The Robot Report. https://www.therobotreport.com/robot-sales-on-track-to-hit-a-new-high-in-2022/ ↩︎

  2. Sperling, E. (2022, November 18). Where all the semiconductor investments are going. Semiconductor Engineering. https://semiengineering.com/where-all-the-semiconductor-investments-are-going/ ↩︎

  3. North American robot sales on track for another record year for 2022. (2022, December 22). Robotics & Automation News. https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2022/12/22/north-american-robot-sales-on-track-for-another-record-year-for-2022/58769/ ↩︎

  4. Marie C. Baca and Ed Sperling. (2022, December 21). RISC-V pushes into the mainstream. Semiconductor Engineering. https://semiengineering.com/risc-v-pushes-into-the-mainstream/?cmid=e9118be1-6a30-4d49-bea8-bc20e169142a ↩︎

  5. Patel, D. (2022, December 26). Ventana RISC-V CPUs beating next generation Intel Sapphire rapids! – Overview of 13 RISC-V companies, CPUs, and ecosystem. SemiAnalysis | Dylan Patel | Substack. https://www.semianalysis.com/p/ventana-risc-v-cpus-beating-next?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email ↩︎

  6. Allinson, M. (2022, December 25). Collaborative robots. Co-operative robots. What’s the difference? Robotics & Automation News. https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2022/12/25/collaborative-robots-co-operative-robots-whats-the-difference/58838/ ↩︎

  7. Jensen, S. (2022, December 21). Centralized radar architecture improves perception capabilities. Electronic Design. https://www.electronicdesign.com/markets/automotive/article/21256841/centralized-radar-architecture-improves-perception-capabilities ↩︎

  8. Hmaidi, A., & Arcesati, R. (2022, December 27). Why Europe struggles with US export controls on China. The Diplomat – The Diplomat is a current-affairs magazine for the Asia-Pacific, with news and analysis on politics, security, business, technology and life across the region. https://thediplomat.com/2022/12/why-europe-struggles-with-us-export-controls-on-china/ ↩︎

  9. Bhat, D. (2022, December 21). How cloud is assisting emergence of robotics as a service in the region. Gulf Business. https://gulfbusiness.com/how-cloud-is-assisting-emergence-of-robotics-as-a-service-in-the-region/ ↩︎

  10. Testouri, M., Elghazaly, G., & Frank, R. (2022, November 28). FastCycle: A message sharing framework for modular automated driving systems. arXiv.org e-Print archive. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.15495.pdf ↩︎

  11. Albore, A., Doose, D., Grand, C., Guiochet, J., Lesire, C., & Manecy, A. (2022, November 30). Skill-based design of dependable robotic architectures. ScienceDirect. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S092188902200207X ↩︎