Acceleration Robotics Announce and Open Sources ROBOTCORE®, the First Robotic Processing Unit – Specialized in ROS Computations
29 Septiembre 2022 - 12:00AM
Business Wire
ROBOTCORE® is a processing unit for the
robotics architect that maps robotics computations efficiently to
its CPUs, GPU and FPGA to obtain faster robots and with additional
real-time capabilities.
Acceleration Robotics —a robotics semiconductor startup based in
the Basque Country, Spain— has announced ROBOTCORE®, a
robot-specific processing unit for the robotics architect. This
Robotic Processing Unit is specialized in accelerating the Robot Operating System (ROS)
computations and features 16xCPUs, a GPU and an FPGA to empower
robots with the ability to react
faster, consume less energy,
and deliver additional real-time
capabilities. The design files of ROBOTCORE® have been
disclosed and open sourced at the ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration
Working Group.
Robotic Processing Unit (RPUs) are robot brains, processing
units for robots that map efficiently robot behaviors (programmed
as ROS computational graphs) to underlying compute resources.
ROBOTCORE® features multiple CPUs, a GPU and an FPGA interconnected
in a common Ethernet databus which allows combining the traditional
control-driven approach used in robotics with a data-driven one.
When architected appropriately, through acceleration kernels (or
robot cores), ROBOTCORE® provides robotics architects with ROS 2
accelerated libraries that deliver faster computations (getting
tasks done quickly once started), additional determinism (task
happens in exactly the same timeframe, each time) and real time
(meeting the time deadlines set for each task).
ROBOTCORE® focuses on accelerating the ROS 2 robotics framework,
a set of software libraries and tools that help build robot
applications. ROS 2 is widely used in robotics and with hundreds of
companies using it everyday for commercial applications, it’s
increasingly becoming the common language in robotics1.
Acceleration Robotics will disclose ROBOTCORE® at the ROS 2
Hardware Acceleration Working Group. The company has open sourced
and contributed ROBOTCORE®’s design files to the Robotic Processing
Unit (RPU) subproject, “so that other robotic architects can use it
as a common hardware blueprint for their robotic brains” – Víctor
Mayoral-Vilches, founder of Acceleration Robotics.
ROBOTCORE® will be showcased in Japan at ROSCon and IROS 2022
conferences and is custom designed to accelerate three robotic
scenarios: autonomous mobility,
industrial manipulation and
healthcare applications. The robotic
processing unit is powered by the technologies of AMD and NVIDIA,
packing best-of-class accelerators from top silicon vendors. Víctor
Mayoral-Vilches who is also a former Systems Architect at Xilinx
(now part of AMD) shares with excitement: “This is a fantastic time
in robotics and with the advent of ROS standardizing as the common
robotics API, we’re starting to see a growing demand for hardware
acceleration in ROS, which makes its computations faster and
power-efficient. ROBOTCORE® attempts to address this demand by
facilitating an open blueprint for architects building robotic
brains”.
About Acceleration Robotics
Acceleration Robotics is a firm focused on designing customized
brains for robots to hasten their response time. Founded by top
robotic experts to deliver semiconductor building blocks for
robots, the company leverages GPUs and FPGAs to create custom
hardware that speeds up a robot's operation.
1About 55% of the total commercial robots to be shipped in 2024
will use ROS. The Rise of ROS: Nearly 55% of total commercial
robots shipped in 2024 Will Have at Least One Robot Operating
System package Installed
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Víctor Mayoral-Vilches (+34) 616151561