Novel Hardware Architecture of EKF-SLAM's Jacobian matrices and its FPGA Implementation

Abstract

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is a critical technique for autonomous navigation systems to build and update a map of the surrounding environment and estimate their own locations in this map. However, due to the computational complexity of SLAM algorithms, it is very difficult to achieve real time implementation on low resources and low complexity platforms. Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is an attractive real-time platform for SLAM systems as they are low power and high performance. In this work, we present a novel EKF-SLAM (Extended Kalman Filter SLAM) Jacobian matrices hardware architecture design and implementation on FPGA. We implemented the design using an FPGA Cyclone 2. The design can reach up to 112 MHz and uses 1517 logic elements, and it respect the real time requirements.