Towards robot accelerators, democratizing hardware acceleration in robotics

While I agree with you that in 50 years, advances in AI will make fast hardware obsolete, it may well be that in 5 years, fast hardware will be able to avoid problems that we cannot yet solve in software. That would mean this company has 45 years to cash in before they get replaced by software.

Results using AGX Orin are in the pipeline and will come out soon as well.

Any given cell may be in production for 10 years - some only for 5, but some for 20 or more - and you need The problem is that academia is working in ROS (now ROS 2), writing Python and VHDL, while the real work in the industry is being done in proprietary vendor tooling that's backwards compatible with training from the 80s. They're proudly advertising touchscreens and full-color 5.7" displays on their teach pendants, as if their customers were still 20 years in the past.

Yes, academia, I do want sub-millimeter repeatability, and flawlessly smooth motion planning. I want collision detection that accommodates both the inertia of the arm itself and any end-of-arm tooling, including cable harnesses with distributed loads. I want automatic singularity avoidance and trivial point and frame manipulation. I want 24-bit encoders for resolution, and I want angular velocities to the moon, and to make those work together I need servo loop rates and high-speed skip responses at 1, 2, or 10 kHz. I want 4D stop position prediction to avoid intersection of the robot arm with complex assemblies and safety zones imported from CAD. I want all these things cheaper and faster, with more storage.

But I need these to be accessible by Billy Joe, whose only credentials that got him the job in the maintenance department is that he helped out his daddy working with a welder and an old clapped-out Bridgeport on the farm growing up. Billy is probably my best tech on 3rd shift, and he's never learned to type on a full-size keyboard, just his smartphone... and on a robot teach pendant.

Regarding who's going to create the accelerators, enablers like this allow any ROSser to jump into creating their own accelerator from C++ by purely adding some metadata into their CMakeLists.txt files (which every ROS package has already).

On top of that, organizations are creating professional-grade kernels meant for production. NVIDIA and AMD are investing in that direction and so are we at Acceleration Robotics. Here're a few of the first ones announced: - Accelerated perception stack (ROS 2 API-compatible) https://accelerationrobotics.com/robotcore-perception.php - Accelerated coordinate system transformation (ROS 2 API-compatible, tf2) https://accelerationrobotics.com/robotcore-transform.php