Machine learning algorithm partially reconfigured on FPGA for an image edge detection system

Unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)have been widely used in military,medical,wireless communications,aerial surveillance,etc.One key topic involving UAVs is pose estimation in autonomous navigation.A standard procedure for this process is to combine inertial navigation system sensor information with the global navigation satellite system(GNSS)signal.However,some factors can interfere with the GNSS signal,such as ionospheric scintillation,jamming,or spoofing.One alternative method to avoid using the GNSS signal is to apply an image processing approach by matching UAV images with georeferenced images.But a high effort is required for image edge extraction.Here a support vector regression(SVR)model is proposed to reduce this computational load and processing time.The dynamic partial reconfiguration(DPR)of part of the SVR datapath is implemented to accelerate the process,reduce the area,and analyze its granularity by increasing the grain size of the reconfigurable region.Results show that the implementation in hardware is 68 times faster than that in software.This architecture with DPR also facilitates the low power consumption of 4 mW,leading to a reduction of 57%than that without DPR.This is also the lowest power consumption in current machine learning hardware implementations.Besides,the circuitry area is 41 times smaller.SVR with Gaussian kernel shows a success rate of 99.18%and minimum square error of 0.0146 for testing with the planning trajectory.This system is useful for adaptive applications where the user/designer can modify/reconfigure the hardware layout during its application,thus contributing to lower power consumption,smaller hardware area,and shorter execution time.

WARA-PS:a research arena for public safety demonstrations and autonomous collaborative rescue robotics experimentation

A research arena(WARA-PS)for sensing,data fusion,user interaction,planning and control of collaborative autonomous aerial and surface vehicles in public safety applications is presented.The objective is to demonstrate scientific discoveries and to generate new directions for future research on autonomous systems for societal challenges.The enabler is a computational infrastructure with a core system architecture for industrial and academic collaboration.This includes a control and command system together with a framework for planning and executing tasks for unmanned surface vehicles and aerial vehicles.The motivating application for the demonstration is marine search and rescue operations.A state-of-art delegation framework for the mission planning together with three specific applications is also presented.The first one concerns model predictive control for cooperative rendezvous of autonomous unmanned aerial and surface vehicles.The second project is about learning to make safe real-time decisions under uncertainty for autonomous vehicles,and the third one is on robust terrain-aided navigation through sensor fusion and virtual reality tele-operation to support a GPS-free positioning system in marine environments.The research results have been experimentally evaluated and demonstrated to industry and public sector audiences at a marine test facility.It would be most difficult to do experiments on this large scale without the WARA-PS research arena.Furthermore,these demonstrator activities have resulted in effective research dissemination with high public visibility,business impact and new research collaborations between academia and industry.