REP-2008 - ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Architecture and Conventions (#…

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* Initial draft of REP-2008

ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Architecture and Conventions

* Remove acceleration_firmware common firmware front-end

Refer to ros-acceleration/acceleration_firmware#1.

Shortly, the rationale of having was to provide
a mechanism to splitting vendors across firmware
packages while keeping a common front-end. After
looking at it critically, there's currently no
strong argument to keep this abstract layer at this
level since this same behavior can be obtained through
colcon-hardware-acceleration extensions so for now,
we've decided to remove this layer from the architecture.

In the future, if needed, acceleration_firmware will be
re-added and should include vendor-common scripts to
deploy and manage firmware

* Add methodology for ROS 2 hw acceleration, fixes

These changes introduce in REP-2008 a proposed methodology for
ROS 2 hardware acceleration and provides 2 use cases wherein
it's demonstrated using the ROS Perception stack.

Minor changes and refines in the content also added

* Add pointers to REP-2007 and REP-2009

Following from community feedback, these changes hint ROS users that inter-Node data exchange can be further optimized by following leveraging REP-2007 and REP-2009.

It must be noted though that each accelerator (and associated host CPUs) may presents various other opportunities which are specific to that architecture. Such aspects shouldn't be discarded and would often lead to best optimizations.

* Adjust text to make it OS-agnostic

Removed pointers to OS-specific tracers and
pushed tracing and benchmarking related topics
to REP-2014.

Signed-off-by: Víctor Mayoral Vilches <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Greg Balke <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Daniel Rosenstein <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Henning Kayser <[email protected]>