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arXiv · 2303.00532

fpgaDDS: An Intra-FPGA Data Distribution Service for ROS 2 Robotics Applications

Christian Lienen·Sorel Horst Middeke·Marco Platzner
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Abstract

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.

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Christian Lienen, Sorel Horst Middeke, Marco Platzner. 2023-03-01. fpgaDDS: An Intra-FPGA Data Distribution Service for ROS 2 Robotics Applications. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.00532

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