News

ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group #15

Source: Acceleration Robotics, February 13, 2023 [1]
Did you know hardware acceleration can speed up your ROS robots by more than 10x? Join us and learn how to use GPUs, FPGAs and other accelerators in robotics.

The ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group is rapidly growing. With plenty of participation from academy and key industry players such as AMD, Xilinx, Microchip Technology Inc., NVIDIA, Intel Corporation, join us to learn about robotperfbenchmarks and various other exciting projects.

2022 ROS 2 metrics report

Source: The Robot Report, February 14, 2023 [2]
ROS is gaining in popularity as an operating system for robotics, with 740 commercial robots using it. In 2022, the total number of ROS packages downloaded increased by 7.45%, with ROS 2 accounting for 39.82% of all ROS downloads. There were 501,333,806 total deb downloads in 2022, and 173.35 terabytes of ROS packages were served from OSUOSL. ROS support channels are changing, with more users moving to the ROS Discourse resource and ROS Answers users down.

Robot sales reach a new high in 2022

Source: The Robot Report, February 10, 2023 [3]
North American robot sales hit a record high in 2022, with 44,196 robots ordered and valued at $2.38 billion. Sales began to slow in Q3, with 8,392 robots ordered in the final quarter.

When will the mobile robot market consolidate?

Source: Robotics Business Review, February 14, 2023 [4]
The mobile robot market is not consolidating, with the combined market share of the top 10 and top 20 leading vendors barely changing between 2018 and 2020 and dropping in 2021. This fragmentation is likely due to the large number of current vendors and the continual emergence of new ones.

Why roboticists should prioritize human factors

Source: The Robot Report, February 2, 2023 [5]
Human systems engineering combines engineering and psychology to create systems that work with humans' capabilities and limitations. Dr. Kelly Hale of Draper has outlined three overarching ideas for roboticists: start with an end goal, consider how human and robot limitations and strengths can work together, and minimize communication to make it as efficient as possible.

Here’s how India is turning the US-China chip war into its advantage

Source: Tech Wire Asia, February 13, 2023 [6]
India is looking to attract foreign chipmakers with a US$10 billion government incentive program to boost its domestic chip sector, increasing its economic competition against China.

Why semiconductors are a really big deal

Source: Fair Observer, February 11, 2023 [7]
Tiny semiconductor chips are now used in almost everything, from refrigerators and cars to smartphones and missiles. Manufacturing them requires complex technology and substantial capital. In the age of AI and smart manufacturing, semiconductors are the new oil and the US has acted to block China’s access to critical technology and machinery.

Is RISC-V ready for Supercomputing?

Source: Semiconductor Engineering, February 9, 2023 [8]
RISC-V processors have seen a surge in adoption and experimentation due to their open ISA, allowing the industry to innovate with it. However, questions remain about the software ecosystem and whether the chips, boards, and systems are reliable enough. The chip industry is now entering the era of domain-specific computing, where processors can be highly tailored to specific tasks and outperform other fixed architectures. This can make porting software more problematic if that software needs to be optimized for those custom cores.

Chiplets taking root as silicon-proven hard IP

Source: Semiconductor Engineering, February 9, 2023 [9]
IP reuse via chiplets is an effective and feasible solution to reduce the time and resources needed to redesign IP. The primary chiplet is a basic subset function and is the common denominator of the overall design application. It can be re-used across different product lines targeting that specific design application as part of product segmentation, leveraging the economies of scalability and design re-usability of the common functional block. Chiplets also have a tremendous impact on the semiconductor ecosystem, with multi-company collaboration taking place on system designs today.

Papers

CVA6 RISC-V virtualization: Architecture, Microarchitecture, and design space exploration

Source: arXiv, February 6, 2023 [10]
Virtualization is a key technology used in a variety of applications, and this article describes our work on hardware virtualization support in the RISC-V CVA6 core. We highlight the design of a set of microarchitectural enhancements to alleviate the virtualization performance overhead, and perform a design space exploration (DSE) and post-layout simulations to assess performance, power and area. We observed a performance speedup of up to 16% compared with virtualization-aware non-optimized design, at the minimal cost of 0.78% in area and 0.33% in power.

Speech recognition and hardware accelerator design based on hummingbird core

Source: iopscience, December 12, 2022 [11]
Speech recognition has advantages in human-computer interaction, such as fast recognition speed, accuracy, and flexibility, and this paper develops a hardware accelerator based on a programmable gate array.

Previous Hardware Acceleration in Robotics Newsletters

Past ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group meetings

  1. https://www.linkedin.com/events/ros2hardwareaccelerationworking7030845380250472449/comments/ ↩︎

  2. Oitzman, M. (2023, February 14). 2022 ROS 2 metrics report. The Robot Report. https://www.therobotreport.com/2022-ros-2-metrics-report/ ↩︎

  3. Wessling, B. (2023, February 10). A3: Robot sales reach a new high in 2022. The Robot Report. https://www.therobotreport.com/a3-robot-sales-reach-a-new-high-in-2022/ ↩︎

  4. Sharma, A. (2023, February 14). When will the mobile robot market consolidate? Robotics Business Review. https://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/news/when-will-the-mobile-robot-market-consolidate/ ↩︎

  5. Wessling, B. (2023, February 2). Why roboticists should prioritize human factors. The Robot Report. https://www.therobotreport.com/why-roboticists-should-prioritize-human-factors/?spMailingID=83751&puid=2502618&E=2502618&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=83751 ↩︎

  6. Kaur, D. (2023, February 13). Here’s how India is turning the US-China chip war into its advantage. Tech Wire Asia. https://techwireasia.com/2023/02/heres-how-india-is-turning-the-us-china-chip-war-into-its-advantage/ ↩︎

  7. Singh, A. (2023, February 11). Why semiconductors are a really big deal. Fair Observer. https://www.fairobserver.com/business/why-semiconductors-are-a-really-big-deal/ ↩︎

  8. Bailey, B. (2023, February 9). Is RISC-V ready for Supercomputing? Semiconductor Engineering. https://semiengineering.com/is-risc-v-ready-for-supercomputing/?cmid=9d61fb60-f721-48a2-855b-45d5fcf94917 ↩︎

  9. Mutschler, A. (2023, February 9). Chiplets taking root as silicon-proven hard IP. Semiconductor Engineering. https://semiengineering.com/chiplets-taking-root-as-silicon-proven-hard-ip/?cmid=5b0e9d8a-06b2-4ea2-b3e4-17fa6b29fafd ↩︎

  10. Sa, B., Velente, L., Martins, J., Rossi, D., Benini, L., & Pinto, S. (2023, February 6). CVA6 RISC-V virtualization: Architecture, Microarchitecture, and design space exploration. arXiv.org. https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02969 ↩︎

  11. Weng, Z., Zhang, S., & Cheng, X. (2022, December 12). Speech recognition and hardware accelerator design based on hummingbird core. iopscience. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2414/1/012005/pdf ↩︎