The ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group (HAWG) drive creation, maintenance and testing of hardware acceleration for ROS 2 and Gazebo (https://github.com/ros-acceleration/community).

Robotic Processing Units (RPU) are robot-specific processors that map ROS and other robot computational graphs efficiently to CPUs, FPGAs and GPUs to obtain best peformance. The vision is that RPUs will empower robots with the ability to react faster, consume less power, and deliver additional real-time capabilities with their custom compute architectures that fit best the usual robotics pipelines. This includes tasks across sensing, perception, mapping, localization, motion control, low-level control and actuation.

The ROS 2 Robotic Processing Unit (RPU) subproject is an open attempt to consolidate the HAWG's progress into an incremental series of open demonstrators and a showcase to obtain best performance from ROS 2 computational graphs. The objective of this subproject is NOT to design a new physical device. Existing development platforms will be used to prototype a robot-specific processing unit that performs best when it comes to ROS 2 computational graphs.