ON FPGA BASED ACCELERATION OF IMAGE PROCESSING IN MOBILE ROBOTICS

In visual navigation tasks, a lack of the computational resources is one of the main limitations of micro robotic platforms to be deployed in autonomous missions. It is because the most of nowadays techniques of visual navigation relies on a detection of salient points that is computationally very demanding. In this paper, an FPGA assisted acceleration of image processing is considered to overcome limitations of computational resources available on-board and to enable high processing speeds while it may lower the power consumption of the system. The paper reports on performance evaluation of the CPU–based and FPGA–based implementations of a visual teach-and-repeat navigation system based on detection and tracking of the FAST image salient points. The results indicate that even a computationally efficient FAST algorithm can benefit from a parallel (low–cost) FPGA–based implementation that has a competitive processing time but more importantly it is a more power efficient