  Robotics applications process large amounts of data in real-time and require
compute platforms that provide high performance and energy-efficiency. FPGAs
are well-suited for many of these applications, but there is a reluctance in
the robotics community to use hardware acceleration due to increased design
complexity and a lack of consistent programming models across the
software/hardware boundary. In this paper we present ReconROS, a framework that
integrates the widely-used robot operating system (ROS) with ReconOS, which
features multithreaded programming of hardware and software threads for
reconfigurable computers. This unique combination gives ROS 2 developers the
flexibility to transparently accelerate parts of their robotics applications in
hardware. We elaborate on the architecture and the design flow for ReconROS and
report on a set of experiments that underline the feasibility and flexibility
of our approach.
