Open Source Robotic Processing Unit

Inspired by the ‘proper’ Robotic Processing Unit I was curious what a truly ‘Open’ version of that might look like. The CM4 footprint seems to enable modularity so over on the Twisted Fields forum I did a bit of CM4 module research

In 2023 the ‘openness’  always going to be imperfect, RISC-V is going to be ‘more open’ but all the existing available cores have some degree of IP AFAIK. But let’s explore how far we can go towards ‘open’

I’m assuming

  • We’re running a ROS2 stack
  • Avoiding Kubernetes
  • Closer to real-time the better
  • Controlling some BLDC
  • Preference for boards in Kicad6
  • Getting something working is better than being purist about ‘open’

Possible resource includes

Architecture might look like

 

Other peripherals

CAN hat 1, 2

Camera

Open GPU

Vision accelerator