Supporting a high level of parallelism for statistical algorithms on FPGAs is often hindered by the uncertainty of random memory access and the associated difficulty of scheduling at runtime. By exploiting the statistical properties to tolerate memory request reordering and droppage, speed enhancement and resource reduction of the design can be optimized, leading to a more efficient and parallelizable design. This paper introduces a novel lossy multiport memory capable of high memory bandwidth, providing concurrent accesses to a single address space through multiple ports. The proposed architecture contains parallel memory banks connected by lossy switch networks to multiple input ports and local ring buffers. For 4 parallel read/write ports, our design reduces BRAM usage by 68% while having the operating frequency increased by 50% as compared to state-of-the-art memory designs. The drop rate of the design is 2% under full port utilization, and is reducible without altering the architecture at runtime. With a simple and scalable structure, this memory architecture can be scaled up to 64 parallel read/write ports and beyond, which outperforms most of the existing designs. Experiments show that this lossy memory can reduce slice usage by 90.8 times for random forest training and data compression, with a reduction in accuracy of only 2%.

This paper presents a novel proximity query (PQ) approach capable to detect the collision and calculate the minimal Euclidean distance between two non-convex objects in 3D, namely the robot and the environment. Such approaches are often considered as computationally demanding problems, but are of importance to many applications such as online simulation of haptic feedback and robot collision-free trajectory. Our approach enables to preserve the representation of unstructured environment in the form of triangular meshes. The proposed PQ algorithm is computationally parallel so that it can be effectively implemented on graphics processing units (GPUs). A GPU-based computation scheme is also developed and customized, which shows >200 times faster than an optimized CPU with single core. Comprehensive validation is also conducted on two simulated scenarios in order to demonstrate the practical values of its potential application in image-guided surgical robotics and humanoid robotic control.

The conjugate gradient (CG) is one of the most widely used iterative methods for solving systems of linear equations. However, parallelizing CG for large sparse systems is difficult due to the inherent irregularity in memory access pattern. We propose a novel processor architecture for the sparse conjugate gradient method. The architecture consists of multiple processing elements and memory banks, and is able to compute efficiently both sparse matrix-vector multiplication, and other dense vector operations. A Beneš permutation network with an optimised control scheme is introduced to reduce memory bank conflicts without expensive logic. We describe a heuristics for offline scheduling, the effect of which is captured in a parametric model for estimating the performance of designs generated from our approach.

Proximity Query (PQ) is a process to calculate the relative placement of objects. It is a critical task for many applications such as robot motion planning, but it is often too computationally demanding for real-time applications, particularly those involving human-robot collaborative control. This paper derives a PQ formulation which can support non-convex objects represented by meshes or cloud points. We optimise the proposed PQ for reconfigurable hardware by function transformation and reduced precision, resulting in a novel data structure and memory architecture for data streaming while maintaining the accuracy of results. Run-time reconfiguration is adopted for dynamic precision optimisation. Experimental results show that our optimised PQ implementation on a reconfigurable platform with four FPGAs is 58 times faster than an optimised CPU implementation with 12 cores, 9 times faster than a GPU, and 3 times faster than a double precision implementation with four FPGAs.

This paper presents a real-time control framework for a snake robot with hyper-kinematic redundancy under dynamic active constraints for minimally invasive surgery. A proximity query (PQ) formulation is proposed to compute the deviation of the robot motion from predefined anatomical constraints. The proposed method is generic and can be applied to any snake robot represented as a set of control vertices. The proposed PQ formulation is implemented on a graphic processing unit, allowing for fast updates over 1 kHz. We also demonstrate that the robot joint space can be characterized into lower dimensional space for smooth articulation. A novel motion parameterization scheme in polar coordinates is proposed to describe the transition of motion, thus allowing for direct manual control of the robot using standard interface devices with limited degrees of freedom. Under the proposed framework, the correct alignment between the visual and motor axes is ensured, and haptic guidance is provided to prevent excessive force applied to the tissue by the robot body. A resistance force is further incorporated to enhance smooth pursuit movement matched to the dynamic response and actuation limit of the robot. To demonstrate the practical value of the proposed platform with enhanced ergonomic control, detailed quantitative performance evaluation was conducted on a group of subjects performing simulated intraluminal and intracavity endoscopic tasks.

This paper introduces a novel mixed precision methodology for mathematical optimisation. It involves the use of reduced precision FPGA optimisers for searching potential regions containing the global optimum, and double precision optimisers on a general purpose processor (GPP) for verifying the results. An empirical method is proposed to determine parameters of the mixed precision methodology running on a reconfigurable accelerator consisting of FPGA and GPP. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated using a set of optimisation benchmarks. Using our mixed precision methodology and a modern reconfigurable accelerator, we can locate the global optima 1.7 to 6 times faster compared with quad-core optimiser. The mixed precision optimisations search up to 40.3 times more starting vector per unit time compared with quad core optimisers and only 0.7% to 2.7% of these searches are refined using GPP double precision optimisers. The proposed methodology also allows us to accelerate problems with more complicated functions or to solve problems involving higher dimensions.