Design of Distributed Reconfigurable Robotics Systems with ReconROS

Abstract: 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 paper 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.