Hardware Acceleration of Monte-Carlo Sampling for Energy Efficient Robust Robot Manipulation

TL;DR

This paper presents a hardware-accelerated FPGA implementation of Monte-Carlo sampling for 6DoF robot pose estimation, significantly improving energy efficiency and enabling real-time performance in energy-constrained robotic systems.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel FPGA-based hardware acceleration approach for Monte-Carlo sampling, reducing computational complexity and energy consumption for robot manipulation tasks.

Findings

12X-21X energy efficiency improvement over GPU implementations

Achieves real-time performance without losing accuracy

Supports 6DoF pose estimation in energy-constrained robots

Abstract

Algorithms based on Monte-Carlo sampling have been widely adapted in robotics and other areas of engineering due to their performance robustness. However, these sampling-based approaches have high computational requirements, making them unsuitable for real-time applications with tight energy constraints. In this paper, we investigate 6 degree-of-freedom (6DoF) pose estimation for robot manipulation using this method, which uses rendering combined with sequential Monte-Carlo sampling. While potentially very accurate, the significant computational complexity of the algorithm makes it less attractive for mobile robots, where runtime and energy consumption are tightly constrained. To address these challenges, we develop a novel hardware implementation of Monte-Carlo sampling on an FPGA with lower computational complexity and memory usage, while achieving high parallelism and modularization. Our results show 12X-21X improvements in energy efficiency over low-power and high-end GPU implementations, respectively. Moreover, we achieve real time performance without compromising accuracy.