A High-Performance System-on-Chip Architecture for Direct Tracking for SLAM

Abstract

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping or SLAM, is a family of algorithms that solve the problem of estimating an observer's position in an unknown environment while generating a map of that environment. SLAM algorithms that produce high quality dense maps require powerful hardware platforms. In the simultaneous solution of these two problems, Localization, also known as Tracking, is the one that is latency sensitive and needs a sustained high framerate. This work focuses on providing an efficient, high-performance solution for Direct Tracking using a high bandwidth streaming architecture, optimized for maximum memory throughput. At its centre is a Tracking Core that performs non-linear least-squares optimization for direct whole-image alignment. The architecture is designed to scale with the available hardware resources in order to enable its use for different performance/cost levels and platforms. An initial implementation tested with a Zynq System-on-Chip can process and track more than 22 frames/second with an embedded power budget and achieves a 5× improvement over previous work on FPGA SoCs.