Hardware Acceleration of Robot Scene Perception Algorithms

Hybrid machine learning algorithms that combine deep learning with probabilistic inference techniques provide highly accurate scene perception for robot manipulation. In particular, a 2-stage approach that combines object detection using convolutional neural networks with Monte-Carlo sampling for pose estimation has been shown to perform particularly well under adversarial scenarios. Unfortunately, this accuracy comes at the cost of high computational complexity, which affects runtime, resource utilization, and energy consumption. This paper describes various challenges in developing complexity-aware techniques for robust robot perception and presents a novel hardware accelerator that addresses these challenge. Experimental results show our design is at least 30% faster and consumes 97% less energy compared to an implementation on a high-end GPU. Compared to a low-power GPU implementation, our design is 95% faster while consuming 96% less energy, demonstrating that accurate, energy-efficient scene perception is possible in real time with targeted hardware acceleration.