E2EdgeAI: Energy-Efficient Edge Computing for Deployment of Vision-Based DNNs on Autonomous Tiny Drones

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have attracted attention as a solution within autonomous systems fields as they enable applications such as visual perception and navigation. Although cloud-based approaches have already been highly addressed, there is a growing interest in using both AI and DNNs on the edge as this allows for lower latency and avoids the potential security concerns of transmitting data to a remote server. However, deploying DNNs on edge devices is challenging due to the limited computational power available, as well as energy efficiency being of the utmost importance. In this work, we introduce an approach named E2EdgeAI for Energy-Efficient Edge computing that takes advantage of AI for autonomous tiny drones. This approach optimizes the energy efficiency of DNNs by considering the effects of memory access and core utilization on the energy consumption of tiny UAVs. To perform the experiment, we used a tiny drone named Crazyflie with the AI -deck expansion, which includes an octa-core RISC-V processor. The experimental results show the proposed approach reduces the model size by up to 14.4x, improves energy per inference by 78%, and increases energy efficiency by 5.6x. A recorded video for the proposed approach can be found here: Video.