Hardware-Accelerated Data Decoding and Reconstruction for Automotive LiDAR Sensors

The automotive industry is facing an unprecedented technological transformation towards fully autonomous vehicles. Optimists predict that, by 2030, cars will be sufficiently reliable, affordable, and common to displace most current human driving tasks. To cope with these trends, vehicles require reliable perception systems hear see all the surroundings, being light detection ranging (LiDAR) sensors a key instrument for recreating 3D visualization of world. However, operation, such LiDAR provide high-resolution representations car's vicinity, which results in millions data points processed real-time. With this article we propose ALFA-Pi, packet decoder reconstruction system deployed on embedded reconfigurable hardware platform. By resorting field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology, ALFA-Pi able interface different at same time, while providing custom representation outputs high-level systems. accelerating interface, proposed outperforms software-only approaches, achieving lower latency acquisition decoding tasks reaching high performance ratios.