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A novel framework for UAV returning based on FPGA

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Abstract

To date, most unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) returning technology has relied on the global positioning system (GPS). The risk is that the UAV may be spoofed by fake GPS signals, which could cause it to deviate from its expected flight route. Therefore, a returning framework without GPS is particularly essential. To address this issue, this paper proposes a new UAV returning framework based on improved Kanade–Lucas–Tomasi (KLT) feature tracker. This framework addresses the issues of high computational complexity of KLT by using a field-programmable gate array and designs the hardware acceleration architecture by integrating several optimization methods. Moreover, it adopts hardware/software co-design technology to improve parallelism and resource utilization. With these optimizations, the framework can be deployed on most development boards with flexible hardware resources. Finally, the effectiveness of the improved algorithm are demonstrated using zedboard development board, and the results show that the processing speed can achieve 60 frames per second (fps).

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Notes

  1. https://github.com/BeautifulEnding/klt_detect.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFB2101300), the Foundation of Shanghai Key Laboratory of Navigation and Location-Based Services, Shanghai, 200240, the National Trusted Embedded Software Engineering Technology Research Center (East China Normal University) and the Open Project Program of the State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Trusted Embedded Software Engineering Technology Research Center, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Qunfang He & Wenjie Chen

  2. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Danping Zou

  3. Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China

    Zhilei Chai

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  1. Qunfang He
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  2. Wenjie Chen
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  3. Danping Zou
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  4. Zhilei Chai
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Correspondence to Wenjie Chen.

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He, Q., Chen, W., Zou, D. et al. A novel framework for UAV returning based on FPGA. J Supercomput 77, 4294–4316 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-020-03434-4

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