  In recent years, robots are required to be autonomous and their robotic
software are sophisticated. Robots have a problem of insufficient performance,
since it cannot equip with a high-performance microprocessor due to
battery-power operation. On the other hand, FPGA devices can accelerate
specific functions in a robot system without increasing power consumption by
implementing customized circuits. But it is difficult to introduce FPGA devices
into a robot due to large development cost of an FPGA circuit compared to
software. Therefore, in this study, we propose an FPGA component technology for
an easy integration of an FPGA into robots, which is compliant with ROS (Robot
Operating System). As a case study, we designed ROS-compliant FPGA component of
image labeling using Xilinx Zynq platform. The developed ROS-component FPGA
component performs 1.7 times faster compared to the ordinary ROS software
component.
