Why Compute Matters for UAV Energy Efficiency

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are getting closer to becoming ubiquitous in everyday life. Although the researchers in the robotic domain have made rapid progress in recent years, hardware and software architects in the computer architecture community lack the comprehensive understanding of how performance, power, and computational bottlenecks affect UAV applications. Such an understanding enables system architects to design microchips tailored for aerial agents. This paper is an attempt by computer architects to initiate the discussion between the two academic domains by investigating the underlying compute systems’ impact on aerial robotic applications. To do so, we identify performance and energy constraints and examine the impact of various compute knobs such as processor cores and frequency on these constraints. Our experiment show that such knobs allow for up to 5X speed up for a wide class of applications.