News

ROS 2 Iron Irwini released!

Source: Open Robotics, May 23, 2023 [1]
ROS 2 Iron Irwini, is a short-term release supported until November 2024 and supports three Tier 1 operating systems. Installation instructions and tutorials are available.

Industrial robotics market size to reach USD 77.31 BN by 2032

Source: Investors Observer, May 23, 2023 [2]
The global industrial robotics market size is predicted to reach around USD 77.31 billion by 2032, and it is growing at a notable CAGR of 10.93% from 2023 to 2032, as per study by Precedence Research.

Is NVIDIA becoming a CPU supplier, competing with Intel and AMD?

Source: Forbes, May 23, 2023 [3]
The fact that NVIDIA is partnering with HPE to build a Grace-based Supercomputer should not surprise anyone. They had previously announced two; a monster machine called Alps at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre which is expected to go live later this year, and Venado at the Los Alamos National Laboratory Both of these will be based on the Grace Hopper Superchip.

ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group #23

Source: Acceleration Robotics, May 23, 2023 [4]
Join the exciting ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group on its 23rd meeting to discuss how hardware acceleration and custom compute architectures can speed up robotics. The goal of this meeting is to review the progress we have made over the last week and report on the current status of the group. The meeting is scheduled to be 30 minutes.

Google’s industrial robotics business unit intrinsic chooses Comau as first project partner

Source: Robotics & Automation News, May 16, 2023 [5]
Comau, a specialist maker of industrial robotics and automation products and systems, has been unveiled as the first industry partner of Intrinsic, a business unit of Alphabet, which is the stock market name for Google.

Applied materials to invest $4 bln in Silicon Valley chip research center

Source: Reuters, May 22, 2023 [6]
Applied Materials plans to invest up to $4 billion on a research center in Silicon Valley to speed up advances in semiconductor manufacturing. The EPIC Center will create up to 2,000 engineering jobs and host $25 billion of research work over its first decade. The announcement comes as the U.S. is trying to bring back advanced semiconductor manufacturing.

ROS-industrial Americas consortium celebrates 10th annual meeting at automate 2023

Source: EurekAlert!, May 22, 2023 [7]
ROS-Industrial is a project dedicated to advancing open-source robotics for manufacturing and industry, celebrating its 10th anniversary at its annual meeting in Detroit. It was founded in 2012 by Shaun Edwards.

Intel launches Agilex 7 FPGAs with R-tile, first FPGA with PCIe 5.0 and CXL capabilities

Source: HPCwire, May 22, 2023 [8]
Intel's Agilex 7 with the R-Tile chiplet is shipping production-qualified devices in volume, bringing customers the first FPGA with PCIe 5.0 and CXL capabilities and hard IP. Customers are leveraging R-Tile to accelerate software and data analytics.

EFPGA enabled Chiplets!

Source: Semiwiki, May 18, 2023 [9]
Achronix Semiconductor and Fraunhofer are partnering to address verification/validation challenges in chip design. Achronix stands out as the only independent high-end FPGA provider and provides eFPGA IP technology. Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is the world's leading applied research organization with an annual research budget of €2.9 billion.

Papers

EigenEdge: Real-time software execution at the edge with RISC-V and hardware accelerators

Source: ACM Conferences, May 9, 2023 [10]
The goal of real-time computation at the edge is to achieve balance between low-latency requirements and strict low-power constraints. We introduce a hardware/software co-design approach that combines software applications with Eigen and SoC architectures, resulting in significant performance and energy efficiency gains.

Impact of ROS 2 node composition in robotic systems

Source: arXiv, May 17, 2023 [11]
ROS 2 introduces a new node type, the Component node, which allows nodes to be composed manually or dynamically into processes while retaining separation of concerns in a codebase for distributed development. Benchmarking is provided to analyze its impact on robotic systems.

Previous Hardware Acceleration in Robotics Newsletters

Past ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group meetings

  1. ROS 2 iron Irwini released! (2023, May 23). Open Robotics. https://www-openrobotics-org.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.openrobotics.org/blog/2023/5/23/ros-2-iron-irwini-released?format=amp ↩︎

  2. Industrial robotics market size to reach USD 77.31 BN by 2032. (2023, May 23). Investors Observer. https://www.investorsobserver.com/news/qm-pr/8979822628744858 ↩︎

  3. Freund, K. (2023, May 23). Is NVIDIA becoming a CPU supplier, competing with Intel and AMD? Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlfreund/2023/05/23/is-nvidia-becoming-a-cpu-supplier-competing-with-intel-and-amd/?sh=692a6a9220dd ↩︎

  4. https://www.linkedin.com/events/ros2hardwareaccelerationworking7066829515519344640/comments/ ↩︎

  5. Edwards, D. (2023, May 16). Google’s industrial robotics business unit intrinsic chooses Comau as first project partner. Robotics & Automation News. https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2023/05/16/googles-industrial-robotics-business-unit-intrinsic-chooses-comau-as-first-project-partner/68323/ ↩︎

  6. Lee, J., & Nellis, S. (2023, May 22). Applied materials to invest $4 bln in Silicon Valley chip research center. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/applied-materials-invest-4-bln-silicon-valley-chip-research-center-2023-05-22/ ↩︎

  7. ROS-industrial Americas consortium celebrates 10th annual meeting at automate 2023. (2023, May 22). EurekAlert!. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/989795 ↩︎

  8. Intel launches Agilex 7 FPGAs with R-tile, first FPGA with PCIe 5.0 and CXL capabilities. (2023, May 22). HPCwire. https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/intel-launches-agilex-7-fpgas-with-r-tile-first-fpga-with-pcie-5-0-and-cxl-capabilities/ ↩︎

  9. Nenni, D. (2023, May 18). EFPGA enabled Chiplets! Semiwiki. Retrieved May 24, 2023, from https://semiwiki.com/efpga/achronix/329286-efpga-enabled-chiplets/ ↩︎

  10. Kuan-Lin, C., Eichler, G., Seyoum, B., & Carloni, L. (2023, May 9). EigenEdge: Real-time software execution at the edge with RISC-V and hardware accelerators. ACM Conferences. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3576914.3587510 ↩︎

  11. Macenski, S., Soragna, A., Carroll, M., & Zhenpeng, G. (2023, May 17). Impact of ROS 2 node composition in robotic systems. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09933 ↩︎