Christian Lienen

Christian Lienen, Marco Platzner

Many applications from the robotics domain can benefit from FPGA acceleration. A corresponding key question is how to integrate hardware accelerators into software-centric robotics programming environments. Recently, several approaches have demonstrated hardware acceleration for the robot operating system (ROS), the dominant programming environment in robotics. ROS is a middleware layer that features the composition of complex robotics applications as a set of nodes that communicate via mechanisms such as publish/subscribe, and distributes them over several compute platforms. In this paper, we present a novel approach for event-based programming of robotics applications that leverages ReconROS, a framework for flexibly mapping ROS 2 nodes to either software or reconfigurable hardware. The ReconROS executor schedules callbacks of ROS 2 nodes and utilizes a reconfigurable slot model and partial runtime reconfiguration to load hardware-based callbacks on demand. We describe the ReconROS executor approach, give design examples, and experimentally evaluate its functionality with examples.

Christian Lienen, Marco Platzner

Robotics applications process large amounts of data in real-time and require compute platforms that provide high performance and energy-efficiency. FPGAs are well-suited for many of these applications, but there is a reluctance in the robotics community to use hardware acceleration due to increased design complexity and a lack of consistent programming models across the software/hardware boundary. In this paper we present ReconROS, a framework that integrates the widely-used robot operating system (ROS) with ReconOS, which features multithreaded programming of hardware and software threads for reconfigurable computers. This unique combination gives ROS 2 developers the flexibility to transparently accelerate parts of their robotics applications in hardware. We elaborate on the architecture and the design flow for ReconROS and report on a set of experiments that underline the feasibility and flexibility of our approach.