Proposal for ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group (HAWG)

[vmayoral]

Back in early 2021 we proposed this WG and kicked off activities with the following goals:

@vmayoral

1. Design tools and conventions to seamlessly integrate acceleration kernels and related embedded binaries into the ROS 2 computational graphs leveraging its existing build system ( ament ) and meta build tools ( colcon ). In a nutshell, we want to build awesome tools and conventions for running ROS components while leveraging hardware acceleration in a simplified manner. (2021Q3/Q4)
2. Provide reference examples and blueprints for acceleration architectures used in ROS 2 and Gazebo. First targeting ROS 2 underlayers. Second, stacks on top of ROS 2 and Gazebo. (2022+)
3. Facilitate testing environments that allow to benchmark accelerators with special focus on power consumption and time. (2022Q1)
4. Survey the community interests on acceleration for ROS 2 and Gazebo. (2022)
5. Produce demonstrators with robot components, real robots and fleets that include acceleration to meet their targets. Disseminate results and show how ROS 2 fulfills industry needs. (2022Q2/Q3)

I’m happy to report on the following progress that happened during 2021:

The ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration WG work reached more than 250.000 users/roboticists and generated more than 2000 reactions. The community repo has ~200 biweekly views and the recorded meetings more than 1000 views (data disclosed at the ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group 2021 dissemination report).

Target	Description
2021	1) Design tools and conventions to seamlessly integrate acceleration kernels and related embedded binaries into the ROS 2 computational graphs leveraging its existing build system (ament_acceleration extensions) [1], meta build tools (colcon-acceleration extension) and a new firmware layer (acceleration_firmware) [2].
2021	2) Provide reference examples and blueprints for acceleration architectures used in ROS 2 and Gazebo.
2022	3) Facilitate testing environments that allow to benchmark accelerators with special focus on power consumption and time spent on computations (see HAWG benchmarking approach, community#9, tracetools_acceleration, ros2_kria)
2022	4) Survey the community interests on acceleration for ROS 2 and Gazebo (see discourse announcement, survey).
2022	5) Produce demonstrators with robot components, real robots and fleets that include acceleration to meet their targets (see acceleration_examples).

During today’s meeting 2022-01-25T18:00:00Z, we’ll go through these and present a new set of objectives for this 2022.

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1. See ament_vitis ↩︎

2. See acceleration_firmware_kv260 for an exemplary vendor extension of the acceleration_firmware package ↩︎