Real-time system-level implementation of a telepresence robot using an embedded GPU platform

Abstract

Real-time applications such as telepresence systems present an opportunity to use embedded GPUs for compute acceleration to meet platform goals. In this paper, we develop a prototype of a portable, standalone telepresence robot that performs real-time attention-directed control using an NVIDIA Jetson TK1 embedded platform. We perform platform-specific optimizations to improve thread occupancy, optimize computation workload and improve accuracy of face detection on the embedded GPU and achieve real-time performance of 30 frames per second on the Jetson TK1 and an overall speedup of 10× compared to the ARM CPU version.