Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have the potential to significantly improve the performance and energy efficiency of robotics applications. Several studies propose frameworks that systematically integrate FPGAs into robotic systems, primarily within the Robot Operating System (ROS), the de facto standard middleware for robotics. Recently, two main research directions have emerged: One explores the use of Dynamic Function Exchange (DFX) to time-multiplex hardware-accelerated functions on an FPGA, while the other focuses on intra-FPGA communication, leveraging interconnections between statically mapped hardware-accelerated functions to reduce communication overhead.In this paper, we present a robotics middleware that supports both DFX and dynamic intra-FPGA communication. The middleware employs a static FPGA layout with multiple reconfigurable slots, complemented by router and buffer infrastructure for streaming-based data distribution. Unlike related work, the call-backs executed in reconfigurable slots, the exchanged messages, and the routing configurations do not need to be known at build time, enabling a high degree of runtime flexibility. We describe the hardware architecture, analyze potential deadlock scenarios, and derive constraints required for deadlock-free operation, which our architecture satisfies. We evaluate the middleware using small-scale test cases and a larger autonomous robot simulation. The results quantify the overhead introduced by the flexible design compared to static mappings and demonstrate performance gains over DFX-only and software-only approaches enabled by dynamic intra-FPGA communication.

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.

Many applications from the robotics domain can benefit from FPGA acceleration. A corresponding key question is not only how to integrate hardware accelerators into software-centric robotics programming environments but also how to integrate more advanced approaches like dynamic partial reconfiguration. Recently, several approaches have demonstrated hardware acceleration for the robot operating system (ROS), the dominant programming environment in robotics. ROS is a middleware layer that features the composition of complex robotics applications as a set of nodes that communicate via mechanisms such as publish/subscribe, and distributes them over several compute platforms. In this paper, we present a novel approach for event-based programming of robotics applications that leverages dynamic partial reconfiguration and ReconROS, a framework for flexibly mapping ROS 2 nodes to either software or reconfigurable hardware. The approach bases on the ReconROS executor that schedules callbacks of ROS 2 nodes and utilizes a reconfigurable slot model and partial runtime reconfiguration to load hardware-based callbacks on demand. We describe the ReconROS executor approach, give design examples, and experimentally evaluate its functionality with examples.

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 article, 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.