Distilling Tiny and Ultrafast Deep Neural Networks for Autonomous Navigation on Nano-UAVs
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: -Nano-sized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are ideal candidates for flying Internet-of-Things smart sensors to collect information in narrow spaces. This requires ultrafast navigation under very tight memory/computation constraints. The PULP-Dronet convolutional neural network (CNN) enables autonomous navigation running aboard a nano-UAV at 19 frame/s, at the cost of a large memory footprint of 320 kB and with drone control in complex scenarios hindered by the disjoint training of collision avoidance and steering capabilities. In this work, we distill a novel family of CNNs with better capabilities than PULP-Dronet, but memory footprint reduced by up to 168x x (down to 2.9 kB), achieving an inference rate of up to 139 frame/s; we collect a new open-source unified collision/steering 66 k images data set for more robust navigation; and we perform a thorough in-field analysis of both PULP-Dronet and our tiny CNNs running on a commercially available nano-UAV. Our tiniest CNN, called Tiny-PULP-Dronet v3, navigates with a 100% success rate a challenging and never-seen-before path, composed of a narrow obstacle-populated corridor and a 180 degrees degrees turn, at a maximum target speed of 0.5 m/s. In the same scenario, the State-of-the- Art PULP-Dronet consistently fails despite having 168x more parameters.
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6910003161
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