Navion: A Fully Integrated Energy-Efficient Visual-Inertial Odometry Accelerator for Autonomous Navigation of Nano Drones
By Amr Suleiman, Zhengdong Zhang, Luca Carlone, Sertac Karaman, Vivienne Sze. 2018
49 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper presents Navion, an energy-efficient accelerator for visual-inertial odometry (VIO) that enables autonomous navigation of miniaturized robots (e.g., nano drones), and virtual/augmented reality on portable devices. The chip uses inertial measurements and mono/stereo images to estimate the drone's trajectory and a 3D map of the environment. This estimate is obtained by running a state-of-the-art algorithm based on non-linear factor graph optimization, which requires large irregularly structured memories and heterogeneous computation flow. To reduce the energy consumption and footprint, the entire VIO system is fully integrated on chip to eliminate costly off-chip processing and storage. This work uses compression and exploits both structured and unstructured sparsity to reduce on-chip memory size by 4.1x. Parallelism is used under tight area constraints to increase throughput by 43%. The chip is fabricated in 65nm CMOS, and can process 752×480 stereo images at up to 171 fps and inertial measurements at up to 52 kHz, while consuming an average of 24mW. The chip is configurable to maximize accuracy, throughput and energy-efficiency across different environments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully integrated VIO system in an ASIC.
Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
How researchers see this paper
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In Aerospace Engineering
- Antonio Loquercio
- Luca Benini
- Daniele Palossi
- Davide Scaramuzza
- Henri Rebecq
- Vladlen Koltun
- Daniel Cremers
- Guoquan Huang
In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
- Antonio Loquercio
- Davide Scaramuzza
- Francesco Conti
- Luca Benini
- Daniele Palossi
- Eric Flamand
- Vladlen Koltun
- Daniel Cremers
Citations in the corpus
- A 64-mW DNN-Based Visual Navigation Engine for Autonomous Nano-Drones (2018, methodology): “In [23], an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), called NAVION , for onboard visual-inertial odometry was presented.”