A Sparsity-Aware Autonomous Path Planning Accelerator with HW/SW Co-Design and Multi-Level Dataflow Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhang, Yifan, Niu, Xiaoyu, Tian, Hongzheng, Zhang, Yanjun, Yu, Bo, Liu, Shaoshan, Huang, Sitao
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Zhang, Yifan
Niu, Xiaoyu
Tian, Hongzheng
Zhang, Yanjun
Yu, Bo
Liu, Shaoshan
Huang, Sitao
author_facet Zhang, Yifan
Niu, Xiaoyu
Tian, Hongzheng
Zhang, Yanjun
Yu, Bo
Liu, Shaoshan
Huang, Sitao
contents Path planning is critical for autonomous driving, generating smooth, collision-free, feasible paths based on perception and localization inputs. However, its computationally intensive nature poses significant challenges for resource-constrained autonomous driving hardware. This paper presents an end-to-end FPGA-based acceleration framework targeting the quadratic programming (QP), core of optimization-based path planning. We employ a hardware-friendly alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for QP solving and a parallelizable preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) method for linear systems. By analyzing sparse matrix patterns, we propose customized storage schemes and efficient sparse matrix multiplication units, significantly reducing resource usage and accelerating matrix operations. Our multi-level dataflow optimization strategy incorporates intra-operator parallelization and pipelining, inter-operator fine-grained pipelining, and CPU-FPGA system-level task mapping. Implemented on the AMD ZCU102 platform, our framework achieves state-of-the-art latency and energy efficiency, including 1.48x faster performance than the best FPGA-based design, 2.89x over an Intel i7-11800H CPU, 5.62x over an ARM Cortex-A57 embedded CPU, and 1.56x over a state-of-the-art GPU solution, along with a 2.05x throughput improvement over existing FPGA-based designs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_16177
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Sparsity-Aware Autonomous Path Planning Accelerator with HW/SW Co-Design and Multi-Level Dataflow Optimization
Zhang, Yifan
Niu, Xiaoyu
Tian, Hongzheng
Zhang, Yanjun
Yu, Bo
Liu, Shaoshan
Huang, Sitao
Hardware Architecture
Path planning is critical for autonomous driving, generating smooth, collision-free, feasible paths based on perception and localization inputs. However, its computationally intensive nature poses significant challenges for resource-constrained autonomous driving hardware. This paper presents an end-to-end FPGA-based acceleration framework targeting the quadratic programming (QP), core of optimization-based path planning. We employ a hardware-friendly alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for QP solving and a parallelizable preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) method for linear systems. By analyzing sparse matrix patterns, we propose customized storage schemes and efficient sparse matrix multiplication units, significantly reducing resource usage and accelerating matrix operations. Our multi-level dataflow optimization strategy incorporates intra-operator parallelization and pipelining, inter-operator fine-grained pipelining, and CPU-FPGA system-level task mapping. Implemented on the AMD ZCU102 platform, our framework achieves state-of-the-art latency and energy efficiency, including 1.48x faster performance than the best FPGA-based design, 2.89x over an Intel i7-11800H CPU, 5.62x over an ARM Cortex-A57 embedded CPU, and 1.56x over a state-of-the-art GPU solution, along with a 2.05x throughput improvement over existing FPGA-based designs.
title A Sparsity-Aware Autonomous Path Planning Accelerator with HW/SW Co-Design and Multi-Level Dataflow Optimization
topic Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16177