FPGA Design for Autonomous Vehicle Driving Using Binarized Neural Networks

We propose an autonomous vehicle controlled by FPGAs. In our design, considering embedded systems, we apply the binarized neural networks (BNNs) which can realize a satisfying result in high speed and accuracy to recognize pedestrians and some obstacles on a given road. To detect the traffic light, a passive camera-based pipeline is applied. Furthermore, the implementation of road lane detection is based on color selection algorithm, Canny Edge Detection, and Hough Transformation. The proposed design is realized by two Xilinx boards: PYNQ-Z1 and Zynq-Xc7Z010. These two FPGA boards cooperate with each other through a shared network cable. In the proposed design, the resource used by Zynq-Xc7Z010 can be greatly reduced and the inference time on the FPGA has been thousands times faster than the software implementation.