Design of Distributed Reconfigurable Robotics Systems with ReconROS

Abstract

Robotics applications process large amounts of data in real-time and require compute platforms that provide high performance and energy-e ciency. 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 so ware/hardware boundary. In this paper we present R ROS, a framework that integrates the widely-used robot operating system (ROS) with ReconOS, which features multithreaded programming of hardware and so ware threads for recon gurable computers. is unique combination gives ROS2 developers the exibility to transparently accelerate parts of their robotics applications in hardware. We elaborate on the architecture and the design ow for R ROS and report on a set of experiments that underline the feasibility and exibility of our approach.