Towards Automatic Migration of ROS Components from Software to Hardware
This addresses the problem of bridging high-level software and low-level real-time systems for robotics developers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing frameworks like Unity and FPGAs.
The paper tackles the challenge of integrating ROS with real-time embedded systems by enabling automatic migration of software components to hardware using programmable logic, achieving a unified communication and processing methodology across different levels.
The use of the ROS middleware is a growing trend in robotics in general, ROS and hard real-time embedded systems have however not been easily uniteable while retaining the same overall communication and processing methodology at all levels. In this paper we present an approach aimed at tackling the schism between high-level, flexible software and low-level, real-time software. The key idea of our approach is to enable software components written for a high-level publish-subscribe software architecture to be automatically migrated to a dedicated hardware architecture implemented using programmable logic. Our approach is based on the Unity framework, a unified software/hardware framework based on FPGAs for quickly interfacing high-level software to low-level robotics hardware.