An FPGA Based Energy Efficient DS-SLAM Accelerator for Mobile Robots in Dynamic Environment

Abstract

The Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm is a hotspot in robot application research with the ability to help mobile robots solve the most fundamental problems of “localization” and “mapping”. The visual semantic SLAM algorithm fused with semantic information enables robots to understand the surrounding environment better, thus dealing with complexity and variability of real application scenarios. DS-SLAM (Semantic SLAM towards Dynamic Environment), one of the representative works in visual semantic SLAM, enhances the robustness in the dynamic scene through semantic information. However, the introduction of deep learning increases the complexity of the system, which makes it a considerable challenge to achieve the real-time semantic SLAM system on the low-power embedded platform. In this paper, we realized the high energy-efficiency DS-SLAM algorithm on the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based heterogeneous platform through the optimization co-design of software and hardware with the help of OpenCL (Open Computing Language) development flow. Compared with Intel i7 CPU on the TUM dataset, our accelerator achieves up to 13× frame rate improvement, and up to 18× energy efficiency improvement, without significant loss in accuracy.