For the past month we registered interest on Hardware Acceleration within the ROS 2 community. Thanks all those that showed support or contacted directly! We are excited to see that this topic has raised so much interest and we at Xilinx are motivated to push forward hardware acceleration in robotics and contribute in the open with tools and accelerators that impact ROS 2 and Gazebo flows. For all those that asked, our reference hardware platform will initially be the Kria K26 Adaptive SOM, with its reference carrier board for vision and perception.
If you’d like to stay more tuned to our progress and be notified of meetings, join the Google Group we’ve created. Also, you could check out the information below or simply stay tuned to the wg-acceleration tag:
More details about the Hardware Acceleration WG (HAWG)
Objective: Drive creation, maintenance and testing of acceleration kernels on top of open standards (C++ and OpenCL) for optimized ROS 2 and Gazebo interactions over different compute substrates (including FPGAs, GPUs and ASICs).
With all this, we’re happy to call for the first official WG meeting:
Meeting #1
Come join us during the first meeting of the ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group. The plan for this first meeting is to ==demonstrate current hardware acceleration flows with ROS 2==. We also would like to discuss other hardware acceleration efforts and see how all this can be brought together. For the initial demonstrations we will focus on the following preliminar architecture we’ve been working on to bring acceleration natively to the ROS 2 build system (ament) and meta build tools (colcon). This should facilitate ROS 2 centric acceleration flows using both C++ and/or OpenCL:
We’d love to hear about your acceleration projects so feel free to drop here a line of what you’d like to share with the group and we’ll coordinate time slots, either in this meeting or in follow up ones.
The fist meeting has been originally scheduled to be 30 minutes at a friendly time in America, late afternoon in Europe and horribly bad time in Asia (sorry for that). We’ll be rotating friendly-hours between America and Asia if anyone requests us to do so.
Time: 2021-06-30T18:00:00Z.
Coordinates: Zoom
Phone one-tap: US: +17209289299,99299967182#,0#,8504098917# or +19292056099,99299967182#,0#,8504098917#
Very exciting! That is also a nice looking board. It looks like the global shortages have caused it to have a really long lead time. I will order some now so I can try it out in a few months.
Cool. I am very interested in participating but I am away for summer vacation. Will you record the meeting? I have not used ROS a lot but its extensively used here at my uni and I think easy integration with ROS could mean that more projects would consider using SoC FPGAs. I am very curios to hear what you guys over at Xilinx are thinking
ROS 2 users have additional priorities computational graph-wise which should be considered. E.g. it appears to be quite a hot topic to optimize interactions betwen nodes (inter-process, intra-process and even over the network). Accelerators on this end will add significant value to the overall ROS 2 computational graphs (and even to the underlying data layer graphs, which at the end of the day, matter as most in real deployments). In other words, while it’d be great to have OpenCL kernels to accelerate specific computations, real impact won’t be achieved unless a holistic ROS view is applied (bottlenecks identified, etc.)
Real acceleration would require optimizations not just at the application layer itself, but also at the ROS underlayers so that they don’t impose bottlenecks on the computational graphs. That’s why we’ve set this as a key objective first.
As we mentioned in the past, our effort is also to fight against the Not Invented Here syndrome, which is a big thing in the acceleration/semiconductors world. Big silicon vendors are too self-centric and rather than contributing to expert communities, prefer to reinvent the wheel with their yet-not-new-feature-in-acceleration-language-A or a new GUI-for-robot-simulation-that-adds-nothing-but-looks-B . Our team at Xilinx wants to tackle this and contribute to the ROS 2 community directly, connecting to real ROS users.
I’d encourage you to participate in the future and send to us what you’re working on, so that we consider your needs.
Hi,
I would like to add the Ultra96-v2 board to the list of community supported boards, because is popular (so more people could contribute), not so expensive, and is readily available so we can start working with it. What do you think?
I think this is an awesome idea. I made a section for this at the community repo of the WG and will add your request to the Agenda above. We’ll allocate a few minutes and discuss this during the meeting.
I don’t have an Ultra96-v2 with me so I won’t be able to help much debugging, but I purposely architected things so that extending it to a new board is all about creating another custom acceleration_firmware branch with the firmware artifacts for that specific board (accel_fw in the following diagram):
All of this will be detailed in the repo. If done properly, then ament_acceleration derived packages (e.g. ament_vitis) should pick all the artifacts automatically and connect it with the ROS build system and tools so that you’d only need to invoke colcon build with a mixin, that’ll be it. We sent these software components to legal for open sourcing them and they’ll be out as soon as we get the approvals. I’ll be demonstrating this in the first WG meeting. Also, I’ll make sure to detail the process of porting things to another board.
For new developments, I’d highly encourage to stick to the official reference hardware platform (K26) since that’s what we’ll be testing and where all the features will be confirmed to work and available.
If there’s anyone else interested in doing something similar, please speak out!
I will try to get a KV260 as soon as they are available but I would also like to have support for the Ultra96-v2. We have several of those that we use for teaching in a couple master courses.
In general this looks really interesting! Thanks for the effort in pushing this forward @vmayoral
I second @jopequ’s recommendation to support the Ultra96-v2 SoM as well. The board uses the UltraScale+ architecture (same as the KV260, I believe) and has a form-factor that can more easily be integrated with lower SWAP platforms (such as quadrotors or smaller-scale fixed wing UAVs).
Really interesting! Accelerated hardware towards robotic system optimization will lead to a wide variety of complex computational implementation. Concepts, such as cybersecurity could clearly be benefited by this kind of technology! Looking forward to the WG.
Great news! We are very interested in knowing more about the Hardware Acceleration WG initiatives.
We are hosting the Embedded WG focused on micro-ROS features and use cases, and for sure there will be simliar nature interests within the ecosystem.
Thanks @mamerlan, meeting is happening today. I know it’s a bit late in Spain but provided I don’t mess up out of being tired, recordings should be out soon after the meeting. We’ll keep minutes nevertheless .
As for alignment with Embedded WG, I’m sure you know I’m quite tuned to micro-ROS. I look forward to cooperate. Here’re some early thoughts for alignment between the HAWG and the EWG:
it’d be interesting to run micro-ROS Client in either the R5s or into a soft-core (e.g. in a MicroBlaze)
it’d be interesting to offload the agent into Programmable Logic (the FPGA)
which obviously leads to consider pushing part of FastDDS also to the PL
We’ve got a few more ideas involving other architectures for mixed-criticality and link layers that allow for real-time distributed communications (e.g. TSN).
We had a successful kick-off of the ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group where we discussed how we can make ROS 2 faster through FPGAs and GPUs with open technologies, initially focusing on C++ and OpenCL. We registered 27 participants initially and reached more than 30 (I’m being told) during the course of the meeting. This was a first for me in a WG kick-off session. We are very excited and thankful for the interest and the support messages received. Looking forward to continue contributing!
ament_vitis, CMake macros and utilities to include Vitis platform into the ROS 2 build system (ament) and its development flows.
Xilinx Runtime (XRT), an open-source standardized software interface that facilitates communication between the application code and the accelerated-kernels
and finally, the video recording the session:
For those of you that don’t have the time to watch the whole piece, see below for a chapter-ed split:
0:00 Introduction
12:25 Objectives, rationale and hardware reference platforms
16:40 Initial hardware acceleration architecture
22:10 Short demonstration
26:44 Community hardware platforms
29:48 Q&A
43:00 Final remarks
We’ll be following up shortly on a number of the topics discussed over the call. Stay tuned for the next meeting and enjoy summer time !
Thanks @Joe_Dinius, I was hoping to avoid that since I’m in Europe … but I found no better option so that’ll do I guess. Will cancell my order with Farnell and go with Avnet US.
In case someone bumps on it as well, there seem to be also some delays reported. Hopefully it’s just that:
@YangZ having someone from Avnet look at this would be awesome. Specially, I think they’ll benefit a lot if they could commit some engineering resources . We at Xilinx are already doing so.
. Minutes will also be available afterwards.
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. We at Xilinx are already