Automated Integration of High-Level Synthesis FPGA Modules with ROS2 Systems

Integrating FPGAs to robot systems can be a demanding task. In this paper we present Forest, an open-source tool that automatically generates ROS2 nodes for high-level synthesis-based FPGA modules, greatly facilitating the integration of FPGAs with other robot components. Forest runs on the PYNQ version 2.5 environment with ROS2 Eloquent and can be used with Xilinx SoCs, such as Xilinx Zynq-7000. The ROS2-FPGA node generated by Forest is evaluated in an image processing task, where the FPGA logic performs a linear contrast stretch on images of three different sizes, and an average speed-up of 36.3x and a performance per watt improvement of 432.2x is observed when compared to a ROS2 node running on a modern CPU.