  The use of the ROS middleware is a growing trend in robotics in general, ROS
and hard real-time embedded systems have however not been easily uniteable
while retaining the same overall communication and processing methodology at
all levels. In this paper we present an approach aimed at tackling the schism
between high-level, flexible software and low-level, real-time software. The
key idea of our approach is to enable software components written for a
high-level publish-subscribe software architecture to be automatically migrated
to a dedicated hardware architecture implemented using programmable logic. Our
approach is based on the Unity framework, a unified software/hardware framework
based on FPGAs for quickly interfacing high-level software to low-level
robotics hardware.
