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

  1. María José Belda 1
  2. Katzalin Olcoz 1
  3. Fernando Castro 1
  4. Francisco Tirado 1
  1. 1 Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
Journal:
Journal of Computer Science and Technology

ISSN: 1666-6038

Year of publication: 2022

Volume: 22

Issue: 2

Type: Article

DOI: 10.24215/16666038.22.E10 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openOpen access editor

More publications in: Journal of Computer Science and Technology

Abstract

In recent years, autonomous vehicles have attracted the attention of many research groups, both in academia and business, including researchers from leading companies such as Google, Uber and Tesla. This type of vehicles are equipped with systems that are subject to very strict requirements, essentially aimed at performing safe operations –both for potential passengers and pedestrians– as well as carrying out the processing needed for decision making in real time. In many instances, general-purpose processors alone cannot ensure that these safety, reliability and real-time requirements are met, so it is common to implement heterogeneous systems by including accelerators. This paper explores the acceleration of a line detection application in the autonomous car environment using a heterogeneous system consisting of a general-purpose RISC-V core and a domain-specific accelerator. In particular, the application is analyzed to identify the most computationally intensive parts of the code and it is adapted accordingly for more efficient processing. Furthermore, the code is executed on the aforementioned hardware platform to verify that the execution effectively meets the existing requirements in autonomous vehicles, experiencing a 3.7x speedup with respect to running without accelerator.

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