Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group 2023 dissemination report #39

Open
vmayoral opened this issue Jan 4, 2024 · 0 comments
Open
Assignees
Labels
documentation Improvements or additions to documentation

Comments

@vmayoral
Copy link
Member

vmayoral commented Jan 4, 2024

Follows from #34. Summarizing easily measurable dissemination efforts that happened as part of the HAWG:

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 #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), PR finalized and submitted. Unfortunately it got rejected without technical argumentation ( 🔥 heated discussion)
23 ✅ 14) More vendor support. Intel Quartus and oneAPI ecosystems enabled with the ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Stack 5
23 ❌ 15) Robotics MCU #31 milestone 1 6 Instead, worked on an RTL-native FPGA-based ROS 2 implementation for High-Speed Networking: ROBOTCORE ROS 2
23 ✅ 16) RobotPerf benchmarks
23 🚧 17) Robotic Processing Unit, first demonstrators #25
24 🚧 17) Robotic Processing Unit, first demonstrators #25
24 🚧 18) New ROS-related network accelerators that build upon the FPGA-native ROS 2 message-passing infrastructure
24 🚧 19) Evolve RobotPerf and expand it. Include new benchmark categories and other communities

Key articles and posts in traceable digital media

Publication (date & link) views reactions
January
LinkedIn - #ROS is the de facto standard in #robotics for #robot application #development. It’s the #standard to #accelerate. 13K views 337 reactions
LinkedIn - A #robot is a #system of #systems, one that comprises sensors to perceive its environment, actuators to act on it, and computation to process it all. 4K views 78 reactions
February
LinkedIn - Did you know that there're more than 40 companies using the #ROS2 #navigation stack? 6K views 106 reactions
LinkedIn - Build a custom Linux-based production-grade operating system for robots with Yocto and #ROS 2 #Humble using NVIDIA Jetson Nano board. 11K views 203 reactions
LinkedIn - Accelerated #ROS 2 #robotics #perception stack. API-compatible with the ROS 2 perception stack. 7K views 66 reactions
March
LinkedIn - ROS 2 Humble in AMD KR260 with Yocto 6K views 110 reactions
LinkedIn - Acceleration Robotics is growing 16K views 85 reactions
April
LinkedIn - ROS 2 Humble in NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier with Yocto 8K views 129 reactions
LinkedIn - Why is ROS so important? 18K views 300 reactions
LinkedIn - #ROS 2 provides the #robotics tools, libraries, and capabilities needed to develop applications, allowing to gain time and put it into business. 8K views 141 reactions
LinkedIn - We propose a novel framework for Deep Reinforcement #Learning (DRL) in modular #robotics 5K views 67 reactions
May
LinkedIn - Meet Prateek Nagras, CEO of Acceleration Robotics. 3K views 124 reactions
LinkedIn - The Kria robotics stack (KRS) 3K views 40 reactions
LinkedIn - Gym-gazebo2, a toolkit for reinforcement learning using ROS 2 and Gazebo 3K views 57 reactions
LinkedIn - Real-time Linux communications 3K views 44 reactions
LinkedIn - Meet Jasmeet Singh, Robotics Engineer at Acceleration Robotics 3K views 115 reactions
June
LinkedIn - One of ABB #cobot #arms. 21K views 295 reactions
LinkedIn - #ROS-based. Moving to ROS 2. 5K views 107 reactions
LinkedIn - Festo displaying nicely the internals of a #cobot. 4K views 93 reactions
July
LinkedIn - A robot-specific processing unit specialized in #ROS computations. Features 16xCPUs, a GPU and an FPGA. 22K views 336 reactions
August
LinkedIn - ROS 2 Humble in AMD ZCU104 with Yocto 3K views 50 reactions
LinkedIn - ROSCon 2023 comes to INDIA 4K views 226 reactions
LinkedIn - Why is #ROS so important? 7K views 179 reactions
LinkedIn - ROS 2 Humble in Microchip PolarFire Icicle Kit with Yocto 4K views 84 reactions
LinkedIn - ROS 2 Humble in NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier with Yocto 3K views 100 reactions
September
LinkedIn - ROSCon India Registrations 4K views 54 reactions
LinkedIn - Why we are hosting ROSCon India? 4K views 130 reactions
LinkedIn - Meet Alok Sharma, Robotics Engineer at Acceleration Robotics. 5K views 98 reactions
October
LinkedIn - We introduce #RobotPerf, a vendor-agnostic benchmarking suite designed to evaluate #robotics computing performance 10K views 124 reactions
LinkedIn - Acceleration Robotics, RigBetel Labs and ARTPARK will be hosting an online event 11K views 166 reactions
LinkedIn - ROS Robotics Companies 10K views 185 reactions
November
LinkedIn - We are thrilled to announce that Geoffrey Biggs, CTO at Open Robotics. 2K views 99 reactions
LinkedIn - Here's the reveal of the final design of our #robotics #laboratory in Spain. 2K views 46 reactions
LinkedIn - ROSCon India 2023 3K views 78 reactions
LinkedIn - Acceleration Robotics works on cutting-edge research in the intersection of #hardware acceleration and #robotics. 2K views 53 reactions
LinkedIn - ROBOTCORE, ROS 2 API-compatible Tools and IP Cores for robots 3K views 53 reactions
December
LinkedIn - We are glad to share that Qualcomm has joined us as a Platinum Sponsor for ROSCon India! 4K views 89 reactions
LinkedIn - We are glad to share that NVIDIA has joined us as a Platinum Sponsor for ROSCon India! 3K views 100 reactions
LinkedIn - Indian robotics is shackled by high duties. 2K views 61 reactions
Other digital media
Reddit - Multiple posts over the year 277K views N/A
TOTALS 2023 (roughly) 532K VIEWS 4800 REACTIONS

Meeting recordings (YouTube channel)

Publication (date & link) views reactions
HAWG#1 1028 views (0.15x growth) 25 reactions
HAWG#2 508 views (0.14x growth) 16 reactions
HAWG#3 442 views (0.10x growth) 16 reactions
HAWG#4 201 views (0.17x growth) 9 reactions
HAWG#5 180 views (0.13x growth) 3 reactions
HAWG#6 385 views (0.10x growth) 15 reactions
HAWG#7 246 views (0.13x growth) 2 reactions
HAWG#8 229 views (0.18x growth) 9 reactions
HAWG#9 370 views (0.10x growth) 6 reactions
HAWG#10 433 views (0.27x growth) 5 reactions
HAWG#11 255 views (0.26x growth) 3 reactions
HAWG#12 240 views (0.39x growth) 4 reactions
HAWG#13 229 views (0.74x growth) 2 reactions
HAWG#14 224 views 3 reactions
HAWG#15 218 views 4 reactions
HAWG#16 112 views 1 reactions
HAWG#17 42 views 0 reactions
HAWG#18 39 views 1 reactions
HAWG#19 49 views 0 reactions
HAWG#20 40 views 0 reactions
HAWG#21 72 views 0 reactions
HAWG#22 121 views 0 reactions
RobotPerf subproject - meeting#1 134 views 0 reactions
RobotPerf subproject - meeting#2 47 views 0 reactions
RobotPerf subproject - meeting#3 108 views 1 reactions
RobotPerf subproject - meeting#4 88 views 0 reactions

Goals for 2024

The Hardware Acceleration Working Group continued growing significantly during 2023. Altogether, that is 3 years of continued growth (2021, 2022). Having accomplished most of the initial objectives of the working group when created in 2021, and having supported multiple silicon vendors as part of the The ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Stack, the working group will focus next on three objectives: the first objective is to continue working on demonstrators and case studies. We generated very exciting results within 2023 that we'll expand during the next year and hopefully disclose publicly. The second objectives will be to build upon the success of the reference FPGA-based ROS 2 implementation for High-Speed Networking and explore other accelerators. Some ideas include bridging between other communication middlewares or even pushing the speed of networking interactions faster. The third objective is to evolve the RobotPerf project, which attracted quite a few contributors already (see RobotPerf paper). Subgoals here would be to create more benchmark releases, add new benchmarking categories (with their corresponding benchmark implementations) and ultimately, expand the project to other communities which could benefit from it, all while remaining ROS-centric.

Altogether, the objectives for the coming year look as follows:

Year Objective
24 🚧 17) Robotic Processing Unit, first demonstrators #25
24 🚧 18) New ROS-related network accelerators that build upon the FPGA-native ROS 2 message-passing infrastructure
24 🚧 19) Evolve RobotPerf and expand it. Include new benchmark categories and other communities

Footnotes

  1. See ament_vitis

  2. See acceleration_firmware_kv260 for an exemplary vendor extension of the acceleration_firmware package

  3. Did not get buy-in from maintainers. Stopped the effort.

  4. Discarded for ROSCon and IROS. Lots of work.

  5. Reach out for more information about Intel's enablement extensions of the ROS build system and build tools.

  6. After months of work, given preliminary results and expectations derived from those, we decided to pivot elsewhere and wrap the Robotics MCU project. Shortly, the performance obtained in RISC-V soft-core based ROS 2 implementations explored was not bringing much value on top of existing CPU implementations of ROS 2. Instead, we invested resources in exploring an FPGA-based ROS 2 implementation for High-Speed Networking.

@vmayoral vmayoral added the documentation Improvements or additions to documentation label Jan 4, 2024
@vmayoral vmayoral self-assigned this Jan 4, 2024
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
documentation Improvements or additions to documentation
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

1 participant