Title
Improving Performance-Power-Programmability in Space Avionics with Edge Devices: VBN on Myriad2 SoC
Abstract
AbstractThe advent of powerful edge devices and AI algorithms has already revolutionized many terrestrial applications; however, for both technical and historical reasons, the space industry is still striving to adopt these key enabling technologies in new mission concepts. In this context, the current work evaluates an heterogeneous multi-core system-on-chip processor for use on-board future spacecraft to support novel, computationally demanding digital signal processors and AI functionalities. Given the importance of low power consumption in satellites, we consider the Intel Movidius Myriad2 system-on-chip and focus on SW development and performance aspects. We design a methodology and framework to accommodate efficient partitioning, mapping, parallelization, code optimization, and tuning of complex algorithms. Furthermore, we propose an avionics architecture combining this commercial off-the-shelf chip with a field programmable gate array device to facilitate, among others, interfacing with traditional space instruments via SpaceWire transcoding. We prototype our architecture in the lab targeting vision-based navigation tasks. We implement a representative computer vision pipeline to track the 6D pose of ENVISAT using megapixel images during hypothetical spacecraft proximity operations. Overall, we achieve 2.6 to 4.9 FPS with only 0.8 to 1.1 W on Myriad2, i.e., 10-fold acceleration versus modern rad-hard processors. Based on the results, we assess various benefits of utilizing Myriad2 instead of conventional field programmable gate arrays and CPUs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3440885
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Space avionics architecture, mixed-criticality, visual-based navigation, computer vision, satellite pose tracking, heterogeneous multi-core SoC, SW development framework
Journal
20
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
1539-9087
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.58
0
7