Towards robot accelerators, democratizing hardware acceleration in robotics

I strongly disagree with the rest and your comments indicate a clear lack of (hardware) understanding. I often encounter this in the AI world. Where folks building ANNs just "forget" that this computational abstraction only "grew in popularity" (there were previous accelerators though) when CNNs got implemented as an accelerator in a GPU empowering newer results. The same's likely to happen in robotics.

Robots are real-time systems. Meeting time deadlines in their computations is the most important feature. (robot) Behaviors often take the form of computational graphs, with data flowing between compute abstractions (Nodes), across physical networks (communication buses) and while mapping to underlying sensors, compute technologies and actuators. ROS enables you to build these computational graphs and create robot behaviors by providing libraries, a communication infrastructure, drivers and tools to put it all together.

From a more technical compute architecture perspective, ROS 2 presents an event-driven programming interface. The resulting computational graphs built with it are "event-driven software architectures". Mapping these event-driven software architectures to hardware using CPUs leveraging classic control flow architectures (von Neumann architectures) leads to various issues. A key challenge in applying classic event-driven programming is that CPUs hardly provide real-time and safety guarantees. The de facto strategy in industry to meet the timing deadlines is a laborious, empirical, and case-by-case tuning of the system. This “whack-a-mole” approach is being realized by some, but unsustainable and hard to scale due to the lack of a hardware-supported timing-safe even driven programming interface. This is where accelerators come in. As already adopted in other industries including aerospace, automotive and healthcare, through the creation of custom compute building blocks (accelerators), a hardware/software co-design strategy provides clean behavioral specifications, describing clearly its guarantees in terms of timing (in other words, avoiding memory-centric von Neumann architectures).

Hardware is important. Note the current scarcity of semiconductors, which is one of the drivers of this research. Note also that creating custom accelerators for robotics application not only can lead to performance improvements (i.e. software that runs faster!) but also to more deterministic responses (which affects the downstream pipeline of software!). Rephrasing Alan Kay's quote, if you're serious about robotics, you should care about hardware ;).

In the PLC space, Beckhoff controllers using commodity x86/64 hardware and standardized IEC 61131 programming languages are gobbling up Rockwell and Siemens' market share.

Given they're perpetually about 20 years behind the times, perhaps this year someone at Fanuc, ABB, Kuka, and Yaskawa will catch up to the year 2002 and read Spolsky's admonition [1] that says:

> Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.

Stop trying to turn every division of your company into its own product center. I loathe paying $800/year to Rockwell for the privilege of reading "update your firmware" (and subsequently bricking my controller as an unwilling beta tester) on TechConnect. They're a PLC vendor, they should focus on selling PLC hardware, not making their customers hate them by nickel-and-diming them for software licenses and support contracts. They were down for FOUR DAYS this weekend for planned maintenance. FOUR DAYS!

Likewise, Fanuc should focus on selling servos and castings - robotic manipulator hardware - and stop trying to get the training division to turn a profit. If, instead of a 40 hour course costing $2,000, it was free, there would be more people able to use their $40,000 robot arms! If Roboguide software was free instead of $2,650, clients could more efficiently build more robot cells, and sell more yellow paint! Gah!

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/