FPGAROS: 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.

Implementation of a ROSBased Autonomous Vehicle on an FPGA Board Due to the development of highperformance LSIs, autonomous vehicle will be realized in a few years. The FPGA Design Competition is one of the valuable opportunities to demonstrate an autonomous vehicle on miniature roads. In this paper, we develop a ROSbased autonomous vehicle which is implemented on an FPGA board as a mock car. ROS is a common framework designed to implement various types of robots. Utilizing the ROSbased platform, we develop a model car for the demonstration of an autonomous vehicle. The onboard programmable logic is used to offload the processing of image recognition such as lane detection, traffic signal detection, and obstacle detection. The implementation results demonstrate that we can successfully implement essential components of the vehicle on an FPGA board with the ROSbased system.