Accelerating Autonomous Path Planning on FPGAs with Sparsity-Aware HW/SW Co-Optimizations

Path planning is a critical task in autonomous driving systems, with quadratic programming being the most time-consuming component. Solving quadratic programming problems using a CPU not only takes a long time but can also lead to high power consumption and costs. In this work, we propose an FPGA-based acceleration method for quadratic programming based path planning problems. Our approach leverages an operator splitting solver for quadratic programs (OSQP) and employs the preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) method for solving linear equations, which proves to be more scalable and hardware-friendly than the original direct method. We propose optimizations for better memory management, and boost processing throughput and reduce execution time by task level and operator level parallelism with hardware pipelining. Our FPGA-based implementation achieves up to 1.8× speedup and 3.2× power reduction compared with the Intel i5 CPU, 3.1× speedup compared with ARM Cortex-A57.