Intelligent and autonomous robots are an essential part of the development of industry 4.0 solutions. They will act as a direct interaction partner to humans together in teams and perform works that are much more complex than today‘s typical tasks for industrial robots. Such robots need to deal with a confusing and unpredictable environment and have to react to unforeseeable events. In order to capture this environment and to plan actions, real-time processing of complex sensor information is necessary. Conventional computer architectures appear to be insufficient for such kind of tasks. To solve this problem, hardware accelerators for robotics based on the dataflow paradigm are developed at the Robotics Innovation Center of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence.
