Lorenz: Embedded Hardware-Software Co-Design of the Robot Operating System (ROS)

06.12.2019, 10.00 o'clock, APB 1035

Invitation to the presentation of Anton Lorenz

Topic: Embedded Hardware-Software Co-Design of the Robot Operating System (ROS)

Project: Studienarbeit

Supervisor: Ariel Podlubne

Abstract: Intelligent robots need to solve a lot of complex computations. At the same
time they face severe constraints regarding energy consumption and efficiency as they are often battery powered. Some of those algorithms can be efficiently solved using FPGAs due to their inherently parallel nature. Whilst they not neccessarily offer better performance than CPUs or MCUs due to the usually lower clock speeds, they offer a much better performance per watt. Therefore, it is attempted to use them as accelerators in robotics. As FPGA based development is very complicated, there research has been done to develop ROS compliant IP cores to speed up the development of new applications. These cores usually use wired ethernet connections for communication. To explore a wireless alternative, this project work researches the implementation of a ROS Publisher and Subscriber node using a WiFi module
on an FPGA. It starts with a microblaze processor running the driver for the wifi module and an implementation of a ROS node in software which is programmed in a way as modular as possible. The theoretically speed relevant parts are then moved to the programmable logic from where they communicate with the microblaze processor using the AXI Stream protocol. The AXI Stream protocol was chosen due to its simplicity. The results show that it is in fact possible to implement a ROS node that uses WiFi on an FPGA. For demonstration purposes, the node subscribes to a source of randomly ordered arrays of integers, sorts them and afterwards publishes the sorted arrays on another topic. However, the performance of the WiFi module used here likely will not be able to live up to the requirements of more realistic applications.