Design of Distributed Reconfigurable Robotics Systems with ReconROS

TL;DR

ReconROS is a framework that combines ROS 2 with ReconOS to enable flexible hardware acceleration of robotics applications on reconfigurable computers, addressing design complexity and programming model challenges.

Contribution

It introduces ReconROS, a novel integration of ROS 2 with ReconOS, allowing transparent hardware acceleration in robotics applications.

Findings

Feasibility of hardware acceleration in robotics applications.

Flexibility of the ReconROS framework.

Successful experiments demonstrating performance benefits.

Abstract

Robotics applications process large amounts of data in real-time and require compute platforms that provide high performance and energy-efficiency. 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 software/hardware boundary. In this paper we present ReconROS, a framework that integrates the widely-used robot operating system (ROS) with ReconOS, which features multithreaded programming of hardware and software threads for reconfigurable computers. This unique combination gives ROS 2 developers the flexibility to transparently accelerate parts of their robotics applications in hardware. We elaborate on the architecture and the design flow for ReconROS and report on a set of experiments that underline the feasibility and flexibility of our approach.