6.375 Final Report: Hardware Acceleration for Power Intelligent Wearable Navigation Systems

In today’s world, wearable electronics and devices are becoming of interest in multiple contexts– from the perspective of aesthetics, health and medical monitoring, assistive devices, and connectivity on-the-go. While technology has thus far been focused on computational productivity, feature expansion, and small form-factor, absorption of such technology by the consumer market is strongly limited by excessive power consumption. As such, it is in the best interest of a hardware designer to consider the inclusion of dedicated hardware whenever possible, but also simple algorithms for intelligent power delivery that can be concurrently managed by this hardware. This project seeks to explore this concept as a part of a system designed to be a wearable navigation device for visually-impaired individuals. The MTL Energy Efficient Circuits Group has developed an initial prototype of such a device that employs a Time of Flight (ToF) camera to capture depth data about the environment and process it to identify the presence of obstacles within a user’s field-of-view, finally providing haptic feedback about this information. However, a power expenditure upwards of 15 Watts, resulting from large frame dimensionality, active illumination panels, and statically high frame rates, presents a sufficient barrier to usability and ”wearability” throughout the day. In order to work towards a next generation prototype that is more power-friendly for such an application, the overarching goals of this final project are twofold– to work with the next generation ToF camera (that is smaller in dimensions) to (1) reproduce critical and computationally features from the old system (namely, generating a point cloud) and improve them by implementing them in hardware, and (2) implement a set of dynamic power scaling algorithms for the aforementioned power hungry features, also in hardware. Succinctly stated, our in-scope objectives for this project are as follows: