Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is one of the main components of autonomous navigation systems. With the increase in popularity of drones, autonomous navigation on low-power systems is seeing widespread application. Most SLAM algorithms are computationally intensive and struggle to run in real-time on embedded devices with reasonable accuracy. ORB-SLAM is an open-sourced feature-based SLAM that achieves high accuracy with reduced computational complexity. We propose an SoC based ORB-SLAM system that accelerates the computationally intensive visual feature extraction and matching on hardware. Our FPGA system based on a Zynq-family SoC runs 8.5x, 1.55x and 1.35x faster compared to an ARM CPU, Intel Desktop CPU, and a state-of-the-art FPGA system respectively, while averaging a 2x improvement in accuracy compared to prior work on FPGA.
@article{arxiv.2207.08405,
title = {ORB-based SLAM accelerator on SoC FPGA},
author = {Vibhakar Vemulapati and Deming Chen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.08405},
year = {2022}
}