Accelerating robotics development

Over the past years, robotics development has advanced by leaps and bounds. Nowadays, robots equipped with artificial intelligence are becoming more and more capable of performing various functions. Avnet’s Ultra 96-V2 is integrated with the official ROS standard platform robot, the TurtleBot3. The TurtleBot3’s core technology is SLAM, Navigation and Manipulation, making it a perfect fit for applications as an autonomous security robot or home services robot. The ROS development kit enables consumers to use it for research, hobby and product prototyping purposes.

Avnet’s Ultra 96-V2 uses Xilinx SDSoC and Vivado HLS tools to accelerate a compute intensive portion of the SLAM algorithm within Xilinx Programmable Logic. This can be accessed via a ROS Style abstraction layer for the hardware accelerator. The Ultra 96-V2 has several other key enabling features including the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale + MPSoC ZU3EG A484, 2 USB 3.0 and 1 USB 2.0 downstream ports. Integrated with the TurtleBot3, Avnet’s Ultra 96-V2 enables a significant increase in robot performance.