Towards Automatic Migration of ROS Components from Software to Hardware

TL;DR

This paper introduces an approach to automatically migrate ROS software components to hardware implementations using FPGAs, bridging the gap between high-level software flexibility and real-time hardware constraints.

Contribution

It presents a novel method leveraging the Unity framework to enable seamless migration of ROS components from software to hardware, enhancing real-time performance in robotics.

Findings

Successful demonstration of automatic migration process

Improved real-time performance in robotic systems

Compatibility with existing ROS components

Abstract

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.