Abstract

Robotic systems are known to be computationally intensive. To improve performance, developers tend to implement custom robotic algorithms in hardware. However, a full robotic system typically consists of many interconnected algorithmic components that can easily max-out FPGA resources, thus requiring the designer to adjust each algorithm design for each new robotic systems in order to meet specific systems requirements and limited resources. Furthermore, manual development of digital circuitry using a hardware description language (HDL) such as verilog or VHDL, is error-prone, time consuming, and often takes months or years to develop and verify. Recent developments in high-level synthesis (HLS), enable automatic generation of digital circuit designs from high-level languages such as C or C++. In this thesis, we propose to develop a database of HLS-generated pareto-optimal hardware designs for various robotic algorithms, such that a fully automated process can optimally compose a complete robotic system given a set of system requirements. In the first part of this thesis, we take a first step towards this goal by developing a system for automatic selection of an Occupancy Grid Mapping (OGM) implementation given specific system requirements and resource thresholds. We first generate hundreds of possible hardware designs via Vitis HLS as we vary parameters to explore the designs space. We then present results which evaluate and explore trade-offs of these designs with respect to accuracy, latency, resource utilization, and power. Using these results, we create a software tool which is able to automatically select an optimal OGM implementation. After implementing selected designs on a PYNQ-Z2 FPGA board, our results show that the runtime of the algorithm improves by 35x over a C++-based implementation. In the second part of this thesis, we extend these same techniques to the Particle Filter (PF) algorithm by implementing 7 different resampling methods and varying parameters on hardware, again via HLS. In this case, we are able to explore and analyze thousands of PF designs. Our evaluation results show that runtime of the algorithm using Local Selection Resampling method reaches the fastest performance on an FPGA and can be as much as 10x faster than in C++. Finally, we build another design selection tool that automatically generates an optimal PF implementation from this design space for a given query set of requirements.

Degree

College and Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Rights

https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/