News

Robotekin, the Basque robotics and automation association

Source: LinkedIn, March 30, 2023 [1]
Robotekin is a robotics & automation ecosystem born in the Basque Country, but with an international projection. One focused on creating new business opportunities, partnerships and attracting talent in robotics. We are building "Robots that move people. People moving robots".

Automotive industry sets record by employing 1M robots

Source: The Robot Report, March 22, 2023 [2]
The automotive industry has the largest number of robots working in factories around the world. The operational stock hit a new record of about one million units. This represents about one-third of the total number installed across all industries, according to research from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR).

February 2023 robotics investments total US $620 million

Source: Robotics Business Review, March 28, 2023 [3]
36 robotics investments accounted for US $620M, with funding for firms providing drone enabled data and analytics services particularly strong.

Nvidia speeds key chipmaking computation by 40x

Source: IEEE Spectrum, March 23, 2023 [4]
Nvidia has developed cuLitho, a set of algorithms designed for use with GPUs, to speed up inverse lithography by 40 times. This will allow chipmakers to increase throughput, reduce carbon footprint, and set the foundations for 2-nanometer manufacturing processes.

The chip shortage recovery has turned a corner

Source: Bain, March 23, 2023 [5]
Semiconductor delivery times have shortened, but they remain higher than prepandemic levels.

Qualcomm releases ‘groundbreaking IoT and robotics’ platforms

Source: Robotics & Automation News, March 22, 2023 [6]
Qualcomm Technologies has launched what it says are “the world’s first” integrated 5G IoT processors that are designed to support four major operating systems, in addition to two new robotics platforms, and an accelerator program for IoT ecosystem partners.

ML for Robots, Specialization vs Overfitting

Source: General Robots, February 20, 2023 [7]
A lot of folks want to add ML (machine learning) to make their robots more general purpose, but the truth is that ML tends to make things less general purpose and more specialized. This is because it looks like ML is learning to generalize concepts, but most of the time it's actually learning to interpolate between things it's been trained on.

Need faster application performance?

Source: Troy Media, March 27, 2023 [8]
Every organization thinks that online response times should be faster and batch elapsed times should be shorter. Performance expectations, no matter how unrealistic or even ridiculous, exert a lot of pressure on IT management to work miracles.

RISC-V disrupting EDA

Source: Semiconductor Engineering, March 23, 2023 [9]
Existing EDA companies say it’s unlikely there will be a major change in the industry, but that is because they are not looking at true disruptions.

Papers

Harmonic CUDA: asynchronous programming on GPUs

Source: ACM Digital Library, February 25, 2023 [10]
Harmonic CUDA is a dataflow programming model for GPUs that allows programmers to exploit asynchrony, warp specialization, and hardware acceleration. Two example applications demonstrate how it can improve performance. This paper evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Harmonic CUDA and suggests future work.

fpgaDDS: an intra-FPGA data distribution service for ROS 2 robotics applications

Source: arXiv, March 1, 2023 [11]
fpgaDDS is a lean data distribution service for hardware-mapped ROS 2 nodes that achieves speedups of up to 13.34 and reduces jitter by two orders of magnitude. It relies on a customized and statically generated streaming-based communication architecture.

Previous Hardware Acceleration in Robotics Newsletters

  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #52 - Nvidia works with TSMC, ASML and Synopsis on software to speed up chipmaking, Keys to developing autonomous vehicle software and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #51 - PRESS RELEASE: Peer Robotics partners with Acceleration Robotics to bring hardware acceleration to their collaborative AMR, ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group #16 and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #50 - How the EU chips act could build "Innovation capacity" in Europe, How Efinix is conquering the hurdle of hardware acceleration for devices at the edge and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #49 - ROS 2 HAWG - meeting #15, 600 for-profit companies using ROS and ROS 2, Acceleration Robotics is growing, January 2023 robotics investments total US $521 million and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #48 - RobotPerf, benchmarking interest for robots grows, Acceleration Robotics announces the 1st meeting of the Architectures and Processors Working Group (GTAP) of the AESEMI and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #47 - ROS 2 HAWG #15, 2022 ROS 2 metrics report, Robot sales reach a new high in 2022, When will the mobile robot market consolidate? and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #46 - China overtakes USA in robot density, 3 ways semiconductors enhance automation and efficiency, 10 industries China is focusing on automating and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #45 - ROS 2 HAWG - meeting #14, What slowdown? - December 2022 robotics investments reaches $1.14B and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #44 - ROS developers meet-up organised by acceleration robotics, China unveils new plan for wider robot use from manufacturing to agriculture and more
  • Hardware Acceleration in Robotics #43 - ROS 2 HAWG#14, Acceleration robotics joins AESEMI to lead new processor architectures, ROS 2 HAWG in 2022 and more

Past ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group meetings

  1. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vmayoral_treinta-entidades-y-organizaciones-empresariales-activity-7047201280582164480-7Inh?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop ↩︎

  2. Crowe, S. (2023, March 22). Automotive industry sets record by employing 1M robots. The Robot Report. https://www.therobotreport.com/automotive-industry-sets-record-1m-robots/ ↩︎

  3. Kara, D. (2023, March 28). February 2023 robotics investments total US $620 million. Robotics Business Review. https://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/manufacturing/february-2023-robotics-investments-total-620-million/ ↩︎

  4. Moore, S. K. (2023, March 23). Nvidia speeds key Chipmaking computation by 40x. IEEE Spectrum. https://spectrum.ieee.org/inverse-lithography ↩︎

  5. Hanbury, P., & Hoecker, A. (2023, March 23). The chip shortage recovery has turned a corner. Bain. https://www.bain.com/insights/chip-shortage-recovery-has-turned-a-corner/ ↩︎

  6. Allison, M. (2023, March 22). Qualcomm releases ‘groundbreaking IoT and robotics’ platforms. Robotics & Automation News. https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2023/03/22/qualcomm-releases-groundbreaking-iot-and-robotics-platforms/66136/ ↩︎

  7. Holson, B. (2023, February 20). ML for robots, specialization vs Overfitting. General Robots | Benjie Holson | Substack. https://generalrobots.substack.com/p/ml-for-robots-specialization-vs-overfitting ↩︎

  8. Schulz, Y. (2023, March 27). Need faster application performance? Troy Media. https://troymedia.com/technology/need-faster-application-performance/ ↩︎

  9. Bailey, B. (2023, March 23). RISC-V disrupting EDA. Semiconductor Engineering. https://semiengineering.com/risc-v-disrupting-eda/?cmid=5efb812e-991e-45d0-8cd2-db51c3d0d264 ↩︎

  10. Wapman, J., Porumbescu, S. D., Treichler, S., & Owens, J. D. (2023, February 25). Harmonic CUDA: asynchronous programming on GPUs. ACM Digital Library. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3582514.3582517 ↩︎

  11. Lienen, C., Middeke, S. H., & Platzner, M. (2023, March 1). fpgaDDS: an intra-FPGA data distribution service for ROS 2 robotics applications. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.00532.pdf ↩︎