Contents of this research and development
We try to establish component methods for ‘ROS-compliant FPGA’, and to improve performance and power consumption by reducing overheads in components. ‘ROS-compliant FPGA components’ allow us to input/output many data corresponding to any Publish/Subscribe communication model on ROS. By making the most of FPGA, performance and power consumption can be improved through parallel processing specialized for applications.
The biggest issue of ‘ROS-compliant FPGA’ components is that overheads of delay time in input/output data communication for FPGA processing are huge. That is to say, even data processing becomes faster by using FPGA, we know, delay time in communication between FPGA and software and also in Publish/Subscribe communication between ROS nodes remains huge. In the first year of the research (Phase 1), we work on this issue closely, i.e. we shall be able to reduce overheads of communication delay in FPGA components, and achieve 10 times less power consumption of whole ROS nodes, with consideration for communication between nodes.
In the second and the third year (Phase 2) we are going to develop 'ROS-compliant FPGA components' in order to design a demonstration system of daily life support robots. SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) is a mapping process, where a robot makes a map of its surroundings and estimates its location in the map. SLAM is an essential technology for any autonomous mobile robot including daily life support robots. Unfortunately, its computational complexity is very large, so we utilize ‘ROS-compliant FPGA components' and reduce power consumption. To be specific, we are going to develop 3 kinds of ROS-compliant FPGA components (i.e. camera and sensor input, image recognition process for SLAM, and actuator drive). All the installed components are to be distributed as open sources in ROS official web sites.
Also, the results and strategies obtained through the above research and development are reviewed in a committee, so that issues and next targets are to be clarified for practical implementation and worldwide standardization.