Hardware Acceleration WG, meeting #10

[Víctor Mayoral-Vilches]

https://meet.google.com/vbc-hpua-ncg
 
Tenth meeting of the ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group. This meeting will be last one this season before the summer break (we'll re-engage in September again) so we've prepared a packaged agenda with exciting topics and a complete review of the hardware acceleration capabilities in ROS 2 (Humble), so that all can play around over the summer and try out what's been accomplished so far. In particular, plan of record is to discuss on a) new reference hardware platform and b) ROS 2 hardware acceleration stack, touching in detail on various of the blueprints that have been contributed including Yocto enablement (REP 2000), type adaptation (REP 2007), hardware acceleration architecture and conventions (REP 2008) and type negotiation (REP 2009).

In addition to the usual meeting, for the last 30 minutes, I'm excited to share I'll be presenting research produced in collaboration with researchers from Harvard University on systems architecture and ROS: RobotCore: An Open Architecture for Hardware Acceleration in ROS 2" (paper). Shortly, RobotCore is a hardware acceleration framework for ROS  and ROS 2 that helps build custom compute architectures for robots, or robot cores, which make robots faster, more deterministic and power-efficient. Simply put, it provides a development, build and deployment experience for creating robot hardware and hardware accelerators similar to the standard, non-accelerated ROS development flow. 

A short intro about the ROS 2 hardware acceleration stack published here (and in ROS Discourse).