Hardware Accelerator for Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS)

Abstract

The swift growth of data size and accessibility in recent years has initiated a shift of philosophy in algorithm designs for artificial intelligence and machine learning, since the ability to learn modern systems and applications automatically from massive amounts of data depending on the conventional algorithms has led to ground-breaking performance in important domains such as natural language processing, Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS), speech recognition, and computer vision. Nowadays, the most popular class of techniques used in these domains is called deep learning and is seeing important attention from industry. However, these models require extraordinary massive amounts of data and compute power to train and are limited by the need for better hardware acceleration to be appropriate for scaling beyond current data and model sizes. While the present hardware acceleration solution has been to use clusters of graphics processing units (GPU) as general purpose processors (GPGPU), the use of field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) or Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) provide interesting alternatives, since FPGA and ASIC architectures are flexible which give them the ability to explore model-level optimizations beyond what is possible on fixed architectures such as GPUs and CPU hardware based solutions. As well, FPGAs and ASICs tend to provide high performance per watt of power consumption, which is very remarkable for developing large scale server-based deployment or resource-limited embedded applications. Without a doubt, many artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms are biologically inspired algorithms which mainly depend on dense concurrent computational processing which lead to rely on using FPGA and ASIC as the ideal Platforms for their capabilities to perform Data parallelism, Model parallelism, and Pipeline Parallelism.