ナノUAVナビゲーション向け超低電力RISC-Vクラスタ上でのオプティカルフロー推定の並列化
Parallelizing Optical Flow Estimation on an Ultra-Low Power RISC-V Cluster for Nano-UAV Navigation
8コアの低電力RISC-Vマイコン上でオプティカルフロー計算を並列化し、単一コア比で最大7.21倍の高速化と500fpsの処理を実現した。
著者: Jonas Kühne, Michele Magno, Luca Benini
分類: cs.CV, cs.RO, eess.IV
原文アブストラクト
Optical flow estimation is crucial for autonomous navigation and localization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). On micro and nano UAVs, real-time calculation of the optical flow is run on low power and resource-constrained microcontroller units (MCUs). Thus, lightweight algorithms for optical flow have been proposed targeting real-time execution on traditional single-core MCUs. This paper introduces an efficient parallelization strategy for optical flow computation targeting new-generation multicore low power RISC-V based microcontroller units. Our approach enables higher frame rates at lower clock speeds. It has been implemented and evaluated on the eight-core cluster of a commercial octa-core MCU (GAP8) reaching a parallelization speedup factor of 7.21 allowing for a frame rate of 500 frames per second when running on a 50 MHz clock frequency. The proposed parallel algorithm significantly boosts the camera frame rate on micro unmanned aerial vehicles, which enables higher flight speeds: the maximum flight speed can be doubled, while using less than a third of the clock frequency of previous single-core implementations.
