Recent researches on robotics have shown significant improvement, spanning from algorithms, mechanics to hardware architectures. Robotics, including manipulators, legged robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles, are now widely applied in diverse scenarios. However, the high computation and data complexity of robotic algorithms pose great challenges to its applications. On the one hand, CPU platform is flexible to handle multiple robotic tasks. GPU platform has higher computational capacities and easy-touse development frameworks, so they have been widely adopted in several applications. On the other hand, FPGA-based robotic accelerators are becoming increasingly competitive alternatives, especially in latency-critical and power-limited scenarios. With specialized designed hardware logic and algorithm kernels, FPGA-based accelerators can surpass CPU and GPU in performance and energy efficiency. In this paper, we give an overview of previous work on FPGA-based robotic accelerators covering different stages of the robotic system pipeline. An analysis of software and hardware optimization techniques and main technical issues is presented, along with some commercial and space applications, to serve as a guide for future work.

中文翻译：

---

基于FPGA的机器人计算综述

最近对机器人技术的研究已经显示出显着的改进，从算法、机械到硬件架构。机器人技术，包括机械手、腿式机器人、无人机和自动驾驶汽车，现已广泛应用于各种场景。然而，机器人算法的高计算和数据复杂性对其应用提出了巨大挑战。一方面，CPU 平台可以灵活地处理多个机器人任务。GPU 平台具有更高的计算能力和易于使用的开发框架，因此在多个应用程序中被广泛采用。另一方面，基于 FPGA 的机器人加速器正成为越来越具有竞争力的替代品，尤其是在延迟关键和功率受限的场景中。具有专门设计的硬件逻辑和算法内核，基于 FPGA 的加速器可以在性能和能效方面超越 CPU 和 GPU。在本文中，我们概述了之前基于 FPGA 的机器人加速器的工作，涵盖了机器人系统管道的不同阶段。提出了对软件和硬件优化技术和主要技术问题的分析，以及一些商业和空间应用，以作为未来工作的指南。