FPGA-ROS: Methodology to Augment the Robot Operating System with FPGA Designs

Robotic applications are becoming more complex every day because they rely on multiple heterogeneous sensors and actuators, increasing the computational demand. Energy efficiency becomes an important factor to consider as battery powered robots have limited energy budget. Algorithms have to be carefully implemented to achieve the expected performance. Consequently, there is a need to increase performances of embedded devices for robotics in terms of computational power and energy efficiency. This work presents a methodology to design an architecture for custom embedded hardware applications implemented in Field Programmable Gate Arrays to be compatible with the mainstream Robot Operating System (ROS). Therefore, highly computational algorithms can be implemented as a dedicated hardware module to increase the processing power of any heterogeneous robotic system. A modular design is foreseen to ease the adaptability to changes in the system. A generic interface for all modules is chosen leading to fully customizable messages to exchange data internally or with other parts of the distributed systems.