ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Architecture and Conventions

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

Co-authored-by: Greg Balke <11024792+gbalke@users.noreply.github.com>

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

Refer to ros-acceleration/acceleration_firmware#1.

Shortly, the rationale of having was to provide
a mechanism to splitting vendors across firmware
packages while keeping a common front-end. After
looking at it critically, there's currently no
strong argument to keep this abstract layer at this
level since this same behavior can be obtained through
colcon-hardware-acceleration extensions so for now,
we've decided to remove this layer from the architecture.

In the future, if needed, acceleration_firmware will be
re-added and should include vendor-common scripts to
deploy and manage firmware

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

These changes introduce in REP-2008 a proposed methodology for
ROS 2 hardware acceleration and provides 2 use cases wherein
it's demonstrated using the ROS Perception stack.

Minor changes and refines in the content also added

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

Added cloud extensions as a pillar wihch helps robotic
architects bridge the gap and simplify the use of
hardware acceleration (GPUs, FPGAs, etc.) in the cloud
for ROS allowing to easily build kernels that target
cloud instances while aligning to the standard ROS 2
launch system.

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

Move it instead to reference implementation

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

 - Removed Template for Maintainers
 - Removed labels for Maintainers
 - Removed much of the content of Template for vendors
and pointed to one example.

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

Still need to address a few concerns

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

Addressed most concerns. Ended up re-writing
the REP to a certain extend to enhance readibility
and improve its clarity. Main changes include:

- removed categories and capabilities
- removed completely benchmarking, pushed into REP-2014
- significant rewriting of the intro and motivation
- renamed ament_acceleration to ament_hardware_acceleration
- expanded on pillars and further explained its value
- re-organized kernel levels
- removed all mentions to CI

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>

Following from community feedback, these changes hint ROS users that inter-Node data exchange can be further optimized by following leveraging REP-2007 and REP-2009.

It must be noted though that each accelerator (and associated host CPUs) may presents various other opportunities which are specific to that architecture. Such aspects shouldn't be discarded and would often lead to best optimizations.

Removed pointers to OS-specific tracers and
pushed tracing and benchmarking related topics
to REP-2014.

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <v.mayoralv@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Daniel Rosenstein <danrose@microsoft.com>

Co-authored-by: Henning Kayser <henningkayser@picknik.ai>

Co-authored-by: Henning Kayser <henningkayser@picknik.ai>