6 ms·

Towards robot accelerators, democratizing hardware acceleration in robotics

59 points by vmayoral 4y ago

meowtastic 4y ago
Looks impressive to a layman like myself. I'm guessing it addresses the global shortage of single-board computers like Raspberry Pis right? Curious to know how long it'll take to do that as well.
- vmayoral 4y ago
  Well, yes but not only. There's only so much you can do with Pis and other SBCs that offer a CPU-centric compute solution. Robots are real-time systems and CPUs don't excel at that. When optimizing dataflows for lower latencies and higher throughputs, you typically seek specialized compute architectures and that's wherein GPUs and FPGAs come in. That's what this work really enables.
  - meowtastic 4y ago
    I see, thanks for the explanation!
archivisti 4y ago
comparison using Jetson TX2 or Xavier could have provided better insight instead of Nano 2G which struggles even in basic task but otherwise looks quite promising
- vmayoral 4y ago
  It was benchmarked against Jetson AGX Xavier as well. See https://news.accelerationrobotics.com/hardware-accelerated-ros2-pipelines/ https://news.accelerationrobotics.com/hardware-accelerated-r.... Results using AGX Orin are in the pipeline and will come out soon as well.
j-pb 4y ago
While hardware accelerators in robotics are very cool, and needed. The fact that the entire workflow is ROS2 centric is a bummer. FPGA and Accelerator Programming is already a huge PITA, and despite it's success ROS is really one of the worst frameworks I've ever used in terms of DX. It makes an already hard problem, needlessly harder. I wouldn't be surprised if they developed their own FPGA programming environment based on C++ and CMake, and all kinds of other custom language and tool shenanigans.
- octocop 4y ago
  Do you mind sharing some of the issues that you are having with ROS2? I'm also using it and i find it quite straight forward.
- pabs3 4y ago
  What would you use instead of ROS?
  - thendrill 4y ago
    arduino or rpi with something like mqtt, PyRemoteObjects on top , just a few off the top of my head.
  - cmontella 4y ago
    Indeed, ROS set out to create an ecosystem of reusable robot software infrastructure, but a monoculture has grown instead. I started building a ROS alternative called Mech (see my profile) after becoming frustrated with ROS. It’s getting there but not ready for prime time yet. To answer the sibling comment, my biggest problem with ROS is how inscrutable it is for undergrads. I’ve witnessed students struggle to even install it while following directions step by step. It is a huge mess of incidental complexity, layering the complexity of C++ build systems on top of an IPC system on top of an expansive middleware. The learning curve is so high that when I spend a semester teaching robotics, students still struggle with ROS basics at midterms. The course turns into more about learning ROS rather than learning actual robotics. I’m hoping one day Mech will work along side and in conjunction with ROS to provide an easier way of doing things for those who want to get right to the heart of robotics.
iandanforth 4y ago
Did you know it takes almost a hundred ms for a signal to go from your fingers to your brain? Did you know that the brain is constantly predicting the future to make up for its slow reaction time? Did you know even small computers are really really fast? If you did then you'd probably guess that initiatives like this are a waste of time and money. The difficulty is in the software, not the hardware, or the compute layer. With good algorithms our current crop of robots are already fully capable of producing trillions more in economic value than they do today. We do not need hardware acceleration in robotics. Can we use it if it exists? Sure, but do we care about "democratizing" it? No. There is a place for hardware acceleration in robotics that is making a huge difference and that's in simulation. GPUs, the once and future king, make training robust neural networks possible and fast. If you're an investor reading this who needs a reminder, bet on software.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  Did you know that for predicting what you'll see 100ms into the future you need a level of real-time 3D recognition and world knowledge that we haven't ever solved acceptably, not even offline and parts of it in isolation? 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  The human brain does what it does with roughly 20 watts, if we take the popular figure of the brain taking 1/5th the power of your whole body and the average human body burning 100 watts. How much neural net can you run on silicon with 20 watts?
  - 4y ago
LeifCarrotson 4y ago
As a controls engineer who has implemented and assisted with dozens of robotic manufacturing cells, the problem isn't the motion planning or compute, it's legacy product support and ease of onboarding new hires. Any given cell may be in production for 10 years - some only for 5, but some for 20 or more - and you need <24 hour response times to any mechanical issues that may arise over that duration. Also, one can't expect that the original programmer will be available to diagnose and debug issues that arise in the field after a year or two, so you need a large pool of technicians and maintenance personnel that can understand the software and be productive in the first hour after being introduced to the machine. None of this is valued by academics, instead, the fundamentals of the process of a single lab trying to prove merit as PhD students and, once that credential is acquired, move on to greener pastures is anathema to both of these ideas. 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.
- cs702 4y ago
  After reading this, I'm persuaded this space would benefit greatly from having a few dominant open-source software frameworks and a few dominant open-source hardware standards, making product support and new-hire onboarding much easier for vendors of all sizes. Alas, I recognize that no established vendor in the space would ever want to see the emergence of industry standards. :-P

59 points by vmayoral 4y ago

Looks impressive to a layman like myself. I'm guessing it addresses the global shortage of single-board computers like Raspberry Pis right? Curious to know how long it'll take to do that as well.

vmayoral 4y ago
Well, yes but not only. There's only so much you can do with Pis and other SBCs that offer a CPU-centric compute solution. Robots are real-time systems and CPUs don't excel at that. When optimizing dataflows for lower latencies and higher throughputs, you typically seek specialized compute architectures and that's wherein GPUs and FPGAs come in. That's what this work really enables.
- meowtastic 4y ago
  I see, thanks for the explanation!

archivisti 4y ago

comparison using Jetson TX2 or Xavier could have provided better insight instead of Nano 2G which struggles even in basic task but otherwise looks quite promising

vmayoral 4y ago
It was benchmarked against Jetson AGX Xavier as well. See https://news.accelerationrobotics.com/hardware-accelerated-ros2-pipelines/ https://news.accelerationrobotics.com/hardware-accelerated-r.... Results using AGX Orin are in the pipeline and will come out soon as well.

j-pb 4y ago

While hardware accelerators in robotics are very cool, and needed. The fact that the entire workflow is ROS2 centric is a bummer. FPGA and Accelerator Programming is already a huge PITA, and despite it's success ROS is really one of the worst frameworks I've ever used in terms of DX. It makes an already hard problem, needlessly harder. I wouldn't be surprised if they developed their own FPGA programming environment based on C++ and CMake, and all kinds of other custom language and tool shenanigans.

octocop 4y ago
Do you mind sharing some of the issues that you are having with ROS2? I'm also using it and i find it quite straight forward.
pabs3 4y ago
What would you use instead of ROS?
- thendrill 4y ago
  arduino or rpi with something like mqtt, PyRemoteObjects on top , just a few off the top of my head.
- cmontella 4y ago
  Indeed, ROS set out to create an ecosystem of reusable robot software infrastructure, but a monoculture has grown instead. I started building a ROS alternative called Mech (see my profile) after becoming frustrated with ROS. It’s getting there but not ready for prime time yet. To answer the sibling comment, my biggest problem with ROS is how inscrutable it is for undergrads. I’ve witnessed students struggle to even install it while following directions step by step. It is a huge mess of incidental complexity, layering the complexity of C++ build systems on top of an IPC system on top of an expansive middleware. The learning curve is so high that when I spend a semester teaching robotics, students still struggle with ROS basics at midterms. The course turns into more about learning ROS rather than learning actual robotics. I’m hoping one day Mech will work along side and in conjunction with ROS to provide an easier way of doing things for those who want to get right to the heart of robotics.

iandanforth 4y ago

Did you know it takes almost a hundred ms for a signal to go from your fingers to your brain? Did you know that the brain is constantly predicting the future to make up for its slow reaction time? Did you know even small computers are really really fast? If you did then you'd probably guess that initiatives like this are a waste of time and money. The difficulty is in the software, not the hardware, or the compute layer. With good algorithms our current crop of robots are already fully capable of producing trillions more in economic value than they do today. We do not need hardware acceleration in robotics. Can we use it if it exists? Sure, but do we care about "democratizing" it? No. There is a place for hardware acceleration in robotics that is making a huge difference and that's in simulation. GPUs, the once and future king, make training robust neural networks possible and fast. If you're an investor reading this who needs a reminder, bet on software.

fxtentacle 4y ago
Did you know that for predicting what you'll see 100ms into the future you need a level of real-time 3D recognition and world knowledge that we haven't ever solved acceptably, not even offline and parts of it in isolation? 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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
MichaelCollins 4y ago
The human brain does what it does with roughly 20 watts, if we take the popular figure of the brain taking 1/5th the power of your whole body and the average human body burning 100 watts. How much neural net can you run on silicon with 20 watts?
- 4y ago

LeifCarrotson 4y ago

As a controls engineer who has implemented and assisted with dozens of robotic manufacturing cells, the problem isn't the motion planning or compute, it's legacy product support and ease of onboarding new hires. Any given cell may be in production for 10 years - some only for 5, but some for 20 or more - and you need <24 hour response times to any mechanical issues that may arise over that duration. Also, one can't expect that the original programmer will be available to diagnose and debug issues that arise in the field after a year or two, so you need a large pool of technicians and maintenance personnel that can understand the software and be productive in the first hour after being introduced to the machine. None of this is valued by academics, instead, the fundamentals of the process of a single lab trying to prove merit as PhD students and, once that credential is acquired, move on to greener pastures is anathema to both of these ideas. 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.

cs702 4y ago
After reading this, I'm persuaded this space would benefit greatly from having a few dominant open-source software frameworks and a few dominant open-source hardware standards, making product support and new-hire onboarding much easier for vendors of all sizes. Alas, I recognize that no established vendor in the space would ever want to see the emergence of industry standards. :-P