SuperNoVA: Algorithm-Hardware Co-Design for Resource-Aware SLAM

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) plays a crucial role in robotics, autonomous systems, and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) applications by enabling devices to understand and map unknown environments. However, deploying SLAM in AR/VR applications poses significant challenges, including the demand for high accuracy, real-time processing, and efficient resource utilization, especially on compact and lightweight devices. To address these challenges, we propose SuperNoVA, which enables high-accuracy, real-time, large-scale SLAM in resource-constrained settings through a full-stack system, spanning from algorithm to hardware. In particular, SuperNoVA dynamically constructs a subgraph to meet the latency target while preserving accuracy, virtualizes hardware resources for efficient graph processing, and implements a novel hardware architecture to accelerate the SLAM backend efficiently. Evaluation results demonstrate that, for a large-scale AR dataset, SuperNoVA reduces full SLAM backend computation latency by 89.5% compared to the baseline out-of-order CPU and 78.6% compared to the baseline embedded GPU, and reduces the maximum pose error by 89% over existing SLAM solutions, while always meeting the latency target.