Hardware acceleration in robotics

Current commercial industrial robot controllers use a modular hardware architecture consisting of a central main processor at program level and various additional co-processors for the I/O doing the low level control of the axes. The additional co-processors and logics, which are normally distinguished by functionality and utility, can be customized and deployed on diffferent types of hardware. The research on hardware acceleration focuses on how to systematically create, optimize and deploy an application on one or more hardware devices, which results in a rational and efficient hardware utilization. A test case is being created to verify current hardware acceleration workflow.