Desgin and Implementation of ROS2-based Autonomous Tiny Robot Car with Integration of Multiple ROS2 FPGA Nodes

This paper introduces an autonomous tiny robot car equipped with a camera-based lane detection function and a traffic signal/obstacle, pedestrian recognition function. Each function is integrated by Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2), a middleware for robot system development. Autonomous driving without the need for a driver requires not only lane-following driving but also traffic signal recognition and obstacle recognition. These functions are implemented on FPGA, and we evaluated them. According to these results, the execution time of traffic signal recognition by FPGA was 1.2 to 3.4 times faster than CPU execution. YOLOv4 is used for obstacle recognition, which improved mAP by 3.79 points compared to YOLO v3-Tiny.