# fpgaDDS: An Intra-FPGA Data Distribution Service for ROS 2 Robotics Applications

## TL;DR

fpgaDDS introduces a specialized intra-FPGA data distribution service for ROS 2 robotics applications, significantly improving communication speed and reducing jitter in hardware-accelerated robotic systems.

## Contribution

It presents a novel, lean communication architecture for hardware-mapped ROS 2 nodes, addressing performance bottlenecks of previous approaches like ReconROS.

## Key findings

- Achieves up to 13.34x speedup over software-based ROS 2 applications.
- Reduces jitter by two orders of magnitude.
- Demonstrates effectiveness in autonomous vehicle case studies.

## Abstract

Modern computing platforms for robotics applications comprise a set of heterogeneous elements, e.g., multi-core CPUs, embedded GPUs, and FPGAs. FPGAs are reprogrammable hardware devices that allow for fast and energy-efficient computation of many relevant tasks in robotics. ROS is the de-facto programming standard for robotics and decomposes an application into a set of communicating nodes. ReconROS is a previous approach that can map complete ROS nodes into hardware for acceleration. Since ReconROS relies on standard ROS communication layers, exchanging data between hardware-mapped nodes can lead to a performance bottleneck. This paper presents fpgaDDS, a lean data distribution service for hardware-mapped ROS 2 nodes. fpgaDDS relies on a customized and statically generated streaming-based communication architecture. We detail this communication architecture with its components and outline its benefits. We evaluate fpgaDDS on a test example and a larger autonomous vehicle case study. Compared to a ROS 2 application in software, we achieve speedups of up to 13.34 and reduce jitter by two orders of magnitude.