Optimization of a line detection algorithm for autonomous vehicles on a RISC-V with accelerator

In recent years, autonomous vehicles have attracted theattention of many research groups, both in academiaand business, including researchers from leading com-panies such as Google, Uber and Tesla. This type ofvehicles are equipped with systems that are subjectto very strict requirements, essentially aimed at per-forming safe operations –both for potential passengersand pedestrians– as well as carrying out the process-ing needed for decision making in real time. In manyinstances, general-purpose processors alone cannotensure that these safety, reliability and real-time re-quirements are met, so it is common to implementheterogeneous systems by including accelerators. Thispaper explores the acceleration of a line detection ap-plication in the autonomous car environment using aheterogeneous system consisting of a general-purposeRISC-V core and a domain-specific accelerator. In par-ticular, the application is analyzed to identify the mostcomputationally intensive parts of the code and it isadapted accordingly for more efficient processing. Fur-thermore, the code is executed on the aforementionedhardware platform to verify that the execution effec-tively meets the existing requirements in autonomousvehicles, experiencing a 3.7x speedup with respect torunning without accelerator.