A LOW POWER AND HIGH PERFORMANCE SOFTWARE APPROACH TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ON-BOARD

New generations of ground vehicles are required to perform tasks with an increased level of autonomy. Autonomous navigation and Artificial Intelligence on the edge are growing fields that require more sensors and more computational power to perform these missions. Furthermore, new sensors in the market produce better quality data at higher rates while new processors can increase substantially the computational power. Therefore, near-future ground vehicles will be equipped with large number of sensors that will produce data at rates that has not been seen before, while at the same time, data processing power will be significantly increased. This new scenario of advanced ground vehicles applications and increase in data amount and processing power, has brought new challenges with it: low determinism, excessive power needs, data losses and large response latency. In this article, a novel approach to on-board artificial intelligence (AI) is presented that is based on state-of-the-art academic research of the well known technique of data pipeline. Algorithm pipelining has seen a resurgence in the high performance computing work due its low power use and high throughput capabilities. The approach presented here provides a very sophisticated threading model combination of pipeline and parallelization techniques applied to deep neural networks (DNN), making these type of AI applications much more efficient and reliable. This new approach has been validated with several DNN models and different computer architectures. The results show that the data processing rate and power saving of the applications increase substantially with respect to standard AI solutions, enabling real AI on harsh environments like ground vehicle deployment.

Citation: P. Ghiglino, M. Harshe, “A Low Power And High Performance Software Approach to Artificial Intelligence On-Board,” In Proceedings of the Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering and Technology Symposium (GVSETS), NDIA, Novi, MI, Aug. 15-17, 2023.