dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaNanoCockpit: Performance-optimized Application Framework for AI-based Autonomous Nanorobotics
| Authors | Elia Cereda, Alessandro Giusti, Daniele Palossi |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | 2601.07476vv1 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07476 |
| License | http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/ |
Abstract
Autonomous nano-drones, powered by vision-based tiny machine learning (TinyML) models, are a novel technology gaining momentum thanks to their broad applicability and pushing scientific advancement on resource-limited embedded systems. Their small form factor, i.e., a few 10s grams, severely limits their onboard computational resources to sub-\SI{100}{\milli\watt} microcontroller units (MCUs). The Bitcraze Crazyflie nano-drone is the \textit{de facto} standard, offering a rich set of programmable MCUs for low-level control, multi-core processing, and radio transmission. However, roboticists very often underutilize these onboard precious resources due to the absence of a simple yet efficient software layer capable of time-optimal pipelining of multi-buffer image acquisition, multi-core computation, intra-MCUs data exchange, and Wi-Fi streaming, leading to sub-optimal control performances. Our \textit{NanoCockpit} framework aims to fill this gap, increasing the throughput and minimizing the system's latency, while simplifying the developer experience through coroutine-based multi-tasking. In-field experiments on three real-world TinyML nanorobotics applications show our framework achieves ideal end-to-end latency, i.e. zero overhead due to serialized tasks, delivering quantifiable improvements in closed-loop control performance ($-$30\% mean position error, mission success rate increased from 40\% to 100\%).
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"abstract": "Autonomous nano-drones, powered by vision-based tiny machine learning (TinyML) models, are a novel technology gaining momentum thanks to their broad applicability and pushing scientific advancement on resource-limited embedded systems. Their small form factor, i.e., a few 10s grams, severely limits their onboard computational resources to sub-\\SI{100}{\\milli\\watt} microcontroller units (MCUs). The Bitcraze Crazyflie nano-drone is the \\textit{de facto} standard, offering a rich set of programmable MCUs for low-level control, multi-core processing, and radio transmission. However, roboticists very often underutilize these onboard precious resources due to the absence of a simple yet efficient software layer capable of time-optimal pipelining of multi-buffer image acquisition, multi-core computation, intra-MCUs data exchange, and Wi-Fi streaming, leading to sub-optimal control performances. Our \\textit{NanoCockpit} framework aims to fill this gap, increasing the throughput and minimizing the system\u0027s latency, while simplifying the developer experience through coroutine-based multi-tasking. In-field experiments on three real-world TinyML nanorobotics applications show our framework achieves ideal end-to-end latency, i.e. zero overhead due to serialized tasks, delivering quantifiable improvements in closed-loop control performance ($-$30\\% mean position error, mission success rate increased from 40\\% to 100\\%).",
"arxiv_id": "2601.07476",
"authors": [
"Elia Cereda",
"Alessandro Giusti",
"Daniele Palossi"
],
"categories": [
"cs.RO",
"cs.SE",
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"eess.SY"
],
"license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
"title": "NanoCockpit: Performance-optimized Application Framework for AI-based Autonomous Nanorobotics",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07476",
"version": "v1"
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