Acceleration Robotics :: Hardware Acceleration for Robots

Acceleration Robotics is a specialized Spanish robotics company focused on hardware acceleration for robots. The company designs custom compute architectures — often called “robot brains” or Robotic Processing Units (RPUs) — to make robots faster, more power-efficient, and capable of real-time performance. By leveraging combinations of CPUs, GPUs, and especially FPGAs, Acceleration Robotics accelerates critical ROS/ROS 2 computational graphs, enabling significant improvements in latency, throughput, and determinism for industrial, autonomous mobility, healthcare, and research applications. The company positions itself as “robot architects,” helping roboticists overcome the limitations of general-purpose processors through targeted hardware optimization.

Acceleration Robotics does not manufacture complete robots but provides foundational acceleration technology that powers faster and more capable robotic systems. Its flagship offering is the ROBOTCORE® family — a set of open-source and commercial hardware acceleration tools and IP cores specifically optimized for ROS 2.

Key Robot-Based Acceleration Products:

• ROBOTCORE® Framework: A hardware acceleration framework for ROS and ROS 2 that maps robotic computational graphs efficiently to underlying hardware (CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs). It delivers dramatic performance gains while maintaining ROS 2 API compatibility.
• ROBOTCORE® ROS 2: Accelerates core ROS 2 communications and networking stacks, achieving orders-of-magnitude improvements (e.g., from 62x to thousands-fold faster in some cases).
• ROBOTCORE® RTPS / UDP/IP: FPGA-based IP cores that accelerate DDS-RTPS and UDP/IP networking, resolving indeterminism and delivering ultra-low latency (as low as 700 nanoseconds for small packets).
• ROBOTCORE® Perception and Transform: Accelerated perception pipelines and coordinate transformation (tf2) stacks for faster computer vision and spatial reasoning.
• ROBOTCORE® Collaborative: Solutions for accelerated dynamic collision avoidance using ros2_control APIs.
• ROBOTCORE® Cloud: Tools to accelerate ROS 2 graphs in and with the cloud.

Acceleration Robotics also offers custom hardware acceleration consulting and design services, helping clients build optimized robotic compute architectures. The company collaborates with major semiconductor vendors like AMD and actively open-sources key components to advance the ROS community. Its technology is particularly valuable for high-performance autonomous mobility, industrial manipulators, and healthcare robots where speed, power efficiency, and determinism are critical. Through case studies with partners like CELSA and TEKNIA, Acceleration Robotics demonstrates tangible improvements in metal part manufacturing and legacy robot manipulation.

Overall, Acceleration Robotics is at the forefront of the hardware acceleration movement in robotics, providing the specialized “brains” that enable the next generation of faster, more capable robots.