The ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group (HAWG) launched new projects in 2022 including RobotPerf, the Robotics MCU or the Robotics Processing Unit and achieved a 3.7x growth in outreach over 2021, engaging with more than 1M roboticists within the robotics WG activities during the last year.
The ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group (or HAWG for short) is an open and community-driven robotics group that drives the creation, maintenance and testing of hardware acceleration kernels on top of open standards for optimized ROS 2 and Gazebo interactions over different compute substrates, including FPGAs and GPUs.
This dissemination report is a comprehensive review that presents a summary of the impact and key projects developed by the Working Group over 2022. This working group, consisting of experts in robotics and computer architecture (hardware acceleration), and was formed with the goal of exploring ways to improve the performance and efficiency of robotic systems using hardware acceleration techniques.
The report herein follows from the one produced in 2021 and is intended to serve as a resource for those interested in learning about the latest developments in hardware acceleration for robotics and to provide guidance for future research and development in this area.
New projects during 2022
- RobotPerf, RobotPerf provides an open reference benchmarking suite that is used to evaluate robotics computing performance fairly with ROS 2 as its common baseline, so that robotic architects can make informed decisions about the hardware and software components of their robotic systems.
- Robotics MCU: an open source software and hardware ROS 2 microcontroller unit (MCU) powered by RISC-V. The project's goal is to design and develop an open source software and hardware robotics microcontroller unit (Robotics MCU) powered by RISC-V that delivers lower latency and additional real-time capabilities in ROS 2 MCU interactions. The ultimate objective of the project is to design an MCU that contains a native ROS 2 hardware implementation.
- Robotics Processing Unit: a robot-specific processing unit that uses hardware acceleration and maps robotics computations efficiently to its CPUs, FPGAs and GPUs to obtain best performance. In particular, it specializes in improving the Robot Operating System (ROS 2) related robot computational graphs on underlying compute resources.
Tracking progress
Key milestones
| Year | Objective |
|---|---|
21 |
✅ 1) Design tools and conventions to seamlessly integrate acceleration kernels and related embedded binaries into the ROS 2 computational graphs leveraging its existing build system (ament_acceleration extensions) [1], meta build tools (colcon-acceleration extension) and a new firmware layer (acceleration_firmware) [2]. |
21 |
✅ 2) Provide reference examples and blueprints for acceleration architectures used in ROS 2 and Gazebo. |
21 |
✅ 3) REP-2008 (ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Architecture and Conventions) first draft proposed PR |
22 |
✅ 4) Facilitate testing environments that allow to benchmark accelerators with special focus on power consumption and time spent on computations (see HAWG benchmarking approach, community#9, tracetools_acceleration, ros2_kria) |
22 |
✅ 5) Survey the community interests on acceleration for ROS 2 and Gazebo (see discourse announcement, survey, result). |
22 |
✅ 6) Produce demonstrators with robot components, real robots and fleets that include acceleration to meet their targets (see acceleration_examples). |
22 |
✅ 7) Acceleration of complete ROS 2 computational graphs https://github.com/ros-acceleration/community/issues/20 |
22 |
❌[3] 8) Merge first hardware accelerators (kernels) into upstream packages (candidate: image_pipeline, see image_pipeline instrumented at #717 ) |
22 |
✅ 9) Documentation and a "methodology to hardware accelerate a ROS 2 package" (see #20) |
22 |
❌[4] 10) Organize workshops on robotics and ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration |
22 |
🚧 11) Robotic Processing Unit, first demonstrators #25 |
22 |
✅ 12) REP-2008 (ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Architecture and Conventions) accepted as an official standard |
22 |
✅ 13) REP-2014 (Benchmarking performance in ROS 2) first draft proposed PR |
23 |
🚧 11) REP-2014 (Benchmarking performance in ROS 2) |
23 |
🚧 14) More vendor support. Will work to enable new silicon solutions |
23 |
🚧 15) Robotics MCU #31 milestone 1 |
23 |
🚧 16) RobotPerf benchmarks |
23 |
🚧 17) Robotic Processing Unit, first demonstrators #25 |
Key articles and posts in traceable digital media
Meeting recordings (YouTube channel)
| Publication (date & link) | views | reactions |
|---|---|---|
| April | ||
| HAWG#1 | 887 views (0.55x growth) |
24 reactions |
| HAWG#2 | 445 views (0.72x growth) |
15 reactions |
| HAWG#3 | 399 views (0.32x growth) |
15 reactions |
| HAWG#4 | 171 views (0.94x growth) |
8 reactions |
| HAWG#5 | 158 views | 3 reactions |
| HAWG#6 | 348 views | 15 reactions |
| HAWG#7 | 217 views | 2 reactions |
| HAWG#8 | 194 views | 9 reactions |
| HAWG#9 | 335 views | 6 reactions |
| HAWG#10 | 339 views | 5 reactions |
| HAWG#11 | 202 views | 2 reactions |
| HAWG#12 | 172 views | 4 reactions |
| HAWG#13 | 131 views | 1 reaction |
Goals for 2023
The Hardware Acceleration Working Group has grown significantly over 2022. The working group has several key objectives for 2023. The first objective is to develop and publish a comprehensive set of benchmarking tools packed in a suite (RobotPerf) for measuring the performance and efficiency of various software components (ROS packages) and hardware solutions commonly used in robotics. This will enable members of the working group to accurately compare and evaluate the performance of different hardware options and make informed decisions about which components to use in their own projects.
The second objective is to increase the number of vendors participating in the working group. By engaging in targeted outreach and engagement efforts, the group aims to bring more vendors on board, which will provide more options for members and increase the overall diversity of hardware components available for testing and evaluation.
The third objective is to increase the number of collaborations with industry partners. This will gather practical experience and feedback on the performance of hardware acceleration techniques in real-world robotics applications and will also increase the working group's visibility and impact.
The fourth objective is to continue investing resources in the ongoing strategic projects announced during 2022. In particular RobotPerf, Robotics MCU and the Robotics Processing Unit.
Altogether, the objectives for the coming year look as follows:
| Year | Objective |
|---|---|
23 |
🚧 11) REP-2014 (Benchmarking performance in ROS 2) |
23 |
🚧 14) More vendor support. Will work to enable new silicon solutions |
23 |
🚧 15) Robotics MCU #31 milestone 1 |
23 |
🚧 16) RobotPerf benchmarks |
23 |
🚧 17) Robotic Processing Unit, first demonstrators #25 |
See ament_vitis ↩︎
See acceleration_firmware_kv260 for an exemplary vendor extension of the
acceleration_firmwarepackage ↩︎Did not get buy-in from maintainers. Stopped the effort. ↩︎
Discarded for ROSCon and IROS. Lots of work. ↩︎