News

Robotics market will be worth $218 billion by 2030

Source: Robotics & Automation News, September 26, 2023 [1]
There are already well over 3 million industrial robots installed worldwide, and the pace of installation is increasing rapidly.

The chips act is here to make the EU an ‘innovation powerhouse’

Source: Silicon Republic, September 21, 2023 [2]
The act aims to increase the EU’s global share of chip production, improve its technology and protect from any future supply shortages.

Intel hit with $400 million EU antitrust fine in decades-old case

Source: Reuters, September 22, 2023 [3]
Intel was fined 376 million euros ($400 million) in an EU antitrust case over its anti-competitive practice to block rivals nearly two decades ago. The Luxembourg-based General Court agreed with the European Commission, prompting the case to re-open.

Intel updates FPGA product line

Source: Network World, September 25, 2023 [4]
Cost-optimized products and open-source software stack are among the updates.

Seaports to install almost 400,000 automated guided vehicles by 2030

Source: Robotics & Automation News, September 23, 2023 [5]
The maritime industry has drastically surged its automation efforts in the wake of global seaport congestion.

Hardware acceleration market to reach USD 254.62 Bn by 2029, emerging at a CAGR of 49.2 percent and forecast 2022-2029

Source: openPR, September 25, 2023 [6]
Our latest report takes a deep dive into the world of hardware acceleration, a transformative technology that outperforms traditional software for specific tasks.

Nvidia number one in 2023

Source: Semiwiki, September 22, 2023 [7]
Nvidia is expected to become the largest semiconductor company in 2023, with a projected revenue of $52.9 billion, surpassing Intel's $51.6 billion. This growth is largely due to AI processors.

Semiconductor devices: 3 tricks to device innovation

Source: Semiwiki, September 22, 2023 [8]
The semiconductor industry’s incredible juggernaut has been powered by device innovations at its very core. Moreover, present-day enterprises encounter immense competitive pressures and innovations are a key differentiator to maintain their competitive edge.

Papers

An efficient FPGA-based accelerator for swin transformer

Source: arXiv, August 26, 2023 [9]
The Swin Transformer has revolutionized computer vision, requiring dedicated hardware accelerators for edge computing. FPGAs are used to accelerate convolutional neural networks, but Transformer-based models require non-linear computations like Layer Normalization, Softmax, and GELU. This paper proposes an efficient FPGA-based hardware accelerator for Swin Transformer, focusing on strategies to handle these calculations and MAC computations. The modified models achieved Top-1 accuracy rates of 80.7%, 82.7%, and 82.8% in ImageNet. The proposed accelerator outperforms CPUs and GPUs, making it the fastest FPGA-based accelerator for Swin Transformer.

RED: A systematic real-time scheduling approach for robotic environmental dynamics

Source: arXiv, August 31, 2023 [10]
Intelligent robots navigate dynamic environments with moving mechanical elements and objects, which can alter computational demand and workload structure. To address this, RED is introduced as a real-time scheduling approach for multi-task deep neural network workloads in resource-limited robotic systems. RED uses a deadline-based scheduling framework and MIMONet (multi-input multi-output neural networks) to manage workloads and asynchronous inference. The framework also leverages MIMONet's weight-shared architecture and a workload refinement and reconstruction process. RED has been implemented on various platforms and demonstrated to surpass existing approaches in critical metrics.

Previous Hardware Acceleration in Robotics Newsletters

Past ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group meetings

  1. Allinson, M. (2023, September 26). Robotics market will be worth $218 billion by 2030. Robotics & Automation News. https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2023/09/26/robotics-market-will-be-worth-218-billion-by-2030-forecasts-globaldata/72401/ ↩︎

  2. Gowran, L. M. (2023, September 21). The chips act is here to make the EU an ‘innovation powerhouse’. Silicon Republic. https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/european-chips-act-eu-semiconductors ↩︎

  3. Chee, F. Y., & Meijer, B. H. (2023, September 22). Intel hit with $400 million EU antitrust fine in decades-old case. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/eu-re-imposes-400-mln-fine-intel-abuse-market-power-2023-09-22/ ↩︎

  4. Patrizio, A. (2023, September 25). Intel updates FPGA product line. Network World. https://www.networkworld.com/article/3706874/intel-updates-fpga-product-line.html ↩︎

  5. Edwards, D. (2023, September 23). Seaports to install almost 400,000 automated guided vehicles by 2030. Robotics & Automation News. https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2023/09/23/seaports-to-install-almost-400000-automated-guided-vehicles-by-2030/72326/ ↩︎

  6. Hardware acceleration market to reach USD 254.62 Bn by 2029, emerging at a CAGR of 49.2 percent and forecast 2022-2029. (2023, September 25). openPR. https://www.openpr.com/news/3221408/hardware-acceleration-market-to-reach-usd-254-62-bn-by-2029 ↩︎

  7. Jewell, B. (2023, September 22). Nvidia number one in 2023. Semiwiki. Retrieved September 27, 2023, from https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-services/335616-nvidia-number-one-in-2023/ ↩︎

  8. Welling, M. (2023, September 22). Semiconductor devices: 3 tricks to device innovation. Semiwiki. Retrieved September 27, 2023, from https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-services/emd-electronics/335174-semiconductor-devices-3-tricks-to-device-innovation/ ↩︎

  9. Zhiyang, L., Zhenhua, R., & Pengyu, Y. (2023, August 26). An efficient FPGA-based accelerator for swin transformer. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.13922.pdf ↩︎

  10. Zexin, L., Tao, R., Xiaoxi, H., & Cong, L. (2023, August 29). RED: A systematic real-time scheduling approach for robotic environmental dynamics. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.15368.pdf ↩︎