Position Paper: Prototyping Autonomous Vehicles Applications with Heterogeneous Multi-FpgaSystems

Abstract

One important feature required by autonomous vehicles is the ability to perform a localization task in order to navigate in both known (urban, suburban, and highways) and unknown environments. Instead of relying on LIDAR technology, we propose to leverage a bio-inspired algorithm relying on more conventional cameras and a large neural network (NN) [2]. Yet, this approach must be able to scale. We propose to investigate the development of an FPGA-based solution. Due to the size of NN, dynamic partial reconfiguration will be required, and an efficient (software-based) scheduler must place the hardware tasks on multiple FPGA chip. We intend to implement this algorithm using a unique custom board, Wizarde, which embeds a 3 × 3 matrix of Zynq SoCs with high-end FPGAs to prototype a possible solution.