In many intelligent edge applications involving Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), efficient and real-time localization and mapping is a fundamental issue. Extended Kalman Filter Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (EKFSLAM) algorithm is a classic and successful solution to realize localization and mapping, while it is computationally intensive and poses a challenge for real-time tasks in small and micro robots. To address this issue, this work proposes an energy-efficient, highframe-rate, and reconfigurable EKF-SLAM processor. Firstly, a heterogeneous dual-core architecture is proposed to enable full acceleration of both matrix operations and nonlinear calculations in EKF-SLAM at the hardware architecture level. Secondly, a Reconfigurable Matrix Accelerator (RMA) and Reconfigurable Nonlinear Accelerator (RNA) are proposed to maximize data reuse and support diverse nonlinear functions at the data flow level. Thirdly, a data property-aware strategy is proposed at the data property level, which exploits matrix symmetry, sparsity, and dependency to reduce storage significantly and eliminate redundant computations. FPGA validation results show that the proposed design can achieve a frame rate of 774 fps and an energy efficiency of 0.66 mJ/frame, when performing mapping processes involving 60 landmarks at 100 MHz.

In this work, we observe that indoor 3D object detection across varied scene domains encompasses both universal attributes and specific features. Based on this insight, we propose SOFW, a synergistic optimization framework that investigates the feasibility of optimizing 3D object detection tasks concurrently spanning several dataset domains. The core of SOFW is identifying domain-shared parameters to encode universal scene attributes, while employing domain-specific parameters to delve into the particularities of each scene domain. Technically, we introduce a set abstraction alteration strategy (SAAS) that embeds learnable domain-specific features into set abstraction layers, thus empowering the network with a refined comprehension for each scene domain. Besides, we develop an elementwise sharing strategy (ESS) to facilitate fine-grained adaptive discernment between domain-shared and domain-specific parameters for network layers. Benefited from the proposed techniques, SOFW crafts feature representations for each scene domain by learning domain-specific parameters, whilst encoding generic attributes and contextual interdependencies via domain-shared parameters. Built upon the classical detection framework VoteNet without any complicated modules, SOFW delivers impressive performances under multiple benchmarks with much fewer total storage footprint. Additionally, we demonstrate that the proposed ESS is a universal strategy and applying it to a voxels-based approach TR3D can realize cutting-edge detection accuracy on all S3DIS, ScanNet, and SUN RGB-D datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/mooncake199809/SOFW

We present Centra-Net, a centralized network that concurrently optimizes visual localization over numerous scenes under heterogeneous dataset domains. Centra-Net exemplifies storage efficiency by amalgamating multiple models with task-shared parameters into a singular cohesive structure. Technically, we develop abasic feature extraction unit (BFEU)with two parallel branches: one dedicated to local feature extraction and the other adept at adaptively generating a task-specific attention mask for feature calibration, thus bolstering its feature extraction capability across diverse scenes. Based on the BFEU, we introduce afilter-wise sharing mechanism (FSM)that adaptively determines parameter sharing within the unit, thus facilitating fine-grained parameter allocation. The key insight of FSM resides in reconceptualizing the parameter sharing of the unit as a learnable paradigm, enabling the determination of shared parameters to be made post-training. Finally, we suggest acomplexity-prioritized gradient algorithm (CPGA)that capitalizes on task complexity to attain a harmonious learning space for various tasks, thus safeguarding optimal performances across all tasks. Through rigorous experiments on numerous benchmarks, Centra-Net demonstrates a notable edge over existing state-of-the-art works while operating with a significantly reduced parameter footprint.

This demonstration shows a Extend Kalman Filter-Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (EKF-SLAM) accelerator based System On Chip (SoC) design for Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR). The AMR platform consists of a multi-sensor system with a wheel encoder and LiDAR, and a ZYNQ-7000 FPGA based SoC featuring an EKF-SLAM hardware accelerator. This AMR system achieves real-time SLAM with significant energy efficient improvement against the state-of-the-art designs.

As a classic SLAM algorithm, LIDAR-based EKF SLAM still remains a problem. An open issue is high computational complexity, which leading a very limited map size to sufficient real-time requirements. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose an MJ-EKF SLAM system that is fully implemented on a Heterogeneous Multi-Core SoC(HMS). To limit the EKF SLAM computation complexity, the Map Joining algorithm participates in the framework. The most computation cost step in EKF SLAM and Map Joining algorithms is implemented on an MJ-EKF dedicated accelerator. Meanwhile, several hardware optimization methods are proposed to save logic resources, avoid redundant computation and reduce data communication between on-chip memory and off-chip main memory. Field experiments demonstrate the HMS-based MJ-EKF algorithm achieved high real-time performance (over 30Hz) in a large-scale map with 500 landmarks.