Gleanmer: A 6 mW SoC for Real-Time 3D Gaussian Occupancy Mapping
This work provides the first fabricated SoC for real-time 3D occupancy mapping under 6 mW, addressing power constraints for edge-based AR/VR and autonomous navigation.
Gleanmer is a 6 mW SoC that achieves real-time 3D Gaussian occupancy mapping for edge applications, reducing construction and query energy by up to 63% and 81% respectively, and processing 640x480 images at over 88 fps.
High-fidelity 3D occupancy mapping is essential for many edge-based applications (such as AR/VR and autonomous navigation) but is limited by power constraints. We present Gleanmer, a system on chip (SoC) with an accelerator for GMMap, a 3D occupancy map using Gaussians. Through algorithm-hardware co-optimizations for direct computation and efficient reuse of these compact Gaussians, Gleanmer reduces construction and query energy by up to 63% and 81%, respectively. Approximate computation on Gaussians reduces accelerator area by 38%. Using 16nm CMOS, Gleanmer processes 640x480 images in real time beyond 88 fps during map construction and processes over 540K coordinates per second during map query. To our knowledge, Gleanmer is the first fabricated SoC to achieve real-time 3D occupancy mapping under 6 mW for edge-based applications.