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Video s3
    Details
    Presenter(s)
    Jonas Kühne Headshot
    Display Name
    Jonas Kühne
    Affiliation
    Affiliation
    ETH Zürich
    Country
    Country
    Switzerland
    Author(s)
    Display Name
    Jonas Kühne
    Affiliation
    Affiliation
    ETH Zürich
    Display Name
    Michele Magno
    Affiliation
    Affiliation
    ETH Zürich
    Display Name
    Luca Benini
    Affiliation
    Affiliation
    ETH Zürich / Università di Bologna
    Abstract

    Optical flow estimation is crucial for autonomous navigation and localization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). On micro and nano UAVs, real-time calculation of the optical flow is run on low power and resource-constrained microcontroller units (MCUs). Thus, lightweight algorithms for optical flow have been proposed targeting real-time execution on traditional single-core MCUs. This paper introduces an efficient parallelization strategy for optical flow computation targeting new-generation multicore low power RISC-V based microcontroller units. Our approach enables higher frame rates at lower clock speeds. It has been implemented and evaluated on the eight-core cluster of a commercial octa-core MCU (GAP8) reaching a parallelization speedup factor of 7.21 allowing for a frame rate of 500 frames per second when running on a 50 MHz clock frequency. The proposed parallel algorithm significantly boosts the camera frame rate on micro unmanned aerial vehicles, which enables higher flight speeds: the maximum flight speed can be doubled, while using less than a third of the clock frequency of previous single-core implementations.

    Slides
    • Parallelizing Optical Flow Estimation on an Ultra-Low Power RISC-V Cluster for Nano-UAV Navigation (application/pdf)