A unified accelerator design for LiDAR SLAM algorithms for low-end FPGAs

A fast and reliable LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) system is the growing need for autonomous mobile robots, which are used for a variety of tasks such as indoor cleaning, navigation, and transportation. To bridge the gap between the limited processing power on such robots and the high computational requirement of the SLAM system, in this paper we propose a unified accelerator design for 2D SLAM algorithms on resource-limited FPGA devices. As scan matching is the heart of these algorithms, the proposed FPGA-based accelerator utilizes scan matching cores on the programmable logic part and users can switch the SLAM algorithms to adapt to performance requirements and environments without modifying and re-synthesizing the logic part. We integrate the accelerator into two representative SLAM algorithms, namely particle filter-based and graph-based SLAM. They are evaluated in terms of resource utilization, processing speed, and quality of output results with various real-world datasets, highlighting their algorithmic characteristics. Experiment results on a Pynq-Z2 board demonstrate that scan matching is accelerated by 13.67–14.84x, improving the overall performance of particle filter-based and graph-based SLAM by 4.03–4.67x and 3.09–4.00x respectively, while maintaining the accuracy comparable to their software counterparts and even state-of-the-art methods.