Agreement Facilitates Adoption of Robotics in Industrial and IoT Sectors; EK-RA6M5 Evaluation Kit Now Official Supported micro-ROS Development Board
September 2, 2021
TOKYO, Japan and MADRID, Spain ― Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE:6723), a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, and eProsima, an SME company specialized in middleware solutions, today announced that the Renesas EK-RA6M5 Evaluation Kit for RA MCUs is the official supported hardware platform of the micro-ROS development framework. micro-ROS is the industry’s robotics operating system for MCUs. Renesas teamed with eProsima, the main developer of the micro-ROS framework, to port micro-ROS into the RA MCUs, easing development of professional robotics applications for IoT and industrial systems.
The micro-ROS framework allows a standardized integration of MCUs into the Robot Operating System (ROS) 2 data space. It provides an established application development framework based on standard communication middleware to the embedded world. Porting micro-ROS into the Renesas RA MCUs facilitates the adoption of this robotic framework in Industry 4.0 and Industrial IoT applications. The Renesas e2 studio integrated development environment, which will run on Windows, as well as Linux-based computers, will support the micro-ROS implementation, simplifying the process of using the micro-ROS client library.
The Renesas Advanced (RA) Family of 32-bit Arm® Cortex®-M MCUs deliver optimized performance, security, connectivity and peripheral IP to address the next generation of embedded solutions. Renesas has built a comprehensive partner ecosystem to deliver an array of software and hardware building blocks that work out of the box with RA MCUs, including both Microsoft Azure RTOS and FreeRTOS. This combination makes the RA Family the ideal reference platform for micro-ROS implementations.
“Robotics is becoming increasingly important as Industry 4.0 and Industrial IoT gain steam,” said Roger Wendelken, Senior Vice President in the IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit at Renesas. “The performance and feature set of the RA Family make it the best choice for robotic applications, and we’re pleased to work with eProsima to deliver solutions to our diverse customer base.”
“Achieving cost-effective development depends on a common platform around which hardware and software providers emerge,” said Jaime Martin Losa, eProsima CEO. “micro-ROS represents the tool that bridges the gap between microcontrollers and ROS 2, expanding the scope of new robotic applications based on embedded devices.”
Renesas has developed a ROS-based Robot Body Controller Winning Combination that showcases the RA6M5’s implementation of micro-ROS, complemented by other Renesas components. Winning Combinations consist of complementary analog, power, timing devices and embedded processing, and provide an easy to use architecture, simplifying the design process and significantly reducing design risk for customers in a wide variety of applications. Renesas offers over 250 winning combinations with compatible devices that work together seamlessly, available at renesas.com/win.
Availability
The micro-ROS hardware support is divided into officially supported boards and community supported boards. Support for micro-ROS in the RA MCUs is available in Renesas’ EK-RA6M5 evaluation kit, now the officially supported micro-ROS hardware platform. For more information, customers can visit the Renesas Robot Operating System (ROS) page and the micro-ROS landing page.