First, kudos on NVIDIA for supporting Open Robotics and the ROS community. This addresses some of the concerns raised in the past while discussing GPUs. Also, I’m hoping this is the first of many groups that sponsor Open Robotics and help them continue making ROS great.
@Joe_Dinius I agree there’s a nice alignment and we should try cooperating. We (Xilinx) and NVIDIA held previous meetings in the past and discussed those things that interest us both. There’s common understanding on some topics which are centric to the current architecture of ROS (such as the CPU-centric approach that avoids optimizing dataflow in computational graphs without rewriting packages), having Open Robotics contributing to this will help. REP-2008 RFC - ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Architecture and Conventions is an attempt to find common ground on some aspects, while keeping interoperability across hardware solutions. We’ll be touching this next week briefly.
Since we’re having the meeting in just a few days and this question will pop up, It’d be nice for the folks at Open Robotics (@Katherine_Scott, @gerkey, @tfoote) and NVIDIA (@Hemal_Shah, @ak-nv) to clarify how this effort is going to align with HAWG.
Can someone comment on this?