Ultralow-Power Localization of Insect-Scale Drones: Interplay of Probabilistic Filtering and Compute-in-Memory

We propose a novel compute-in-memory (CIM)-based ultralow-power framework for probabilistic localization of insect-scale drones. Localization is a critical subroutine for path planning and rotor control in drones, where a drone is required to continuously estimate its pose (position and orientation) in flying space. The conventional probabilistic localization approaches rely on the 3-D Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based representation of a 3-D map. A GMM model with hundreds of mixture functions is typically needed to adequately learn and represent the intricacies of the map. Meanwhile, localization using complex GMM map models is computationally intensive. Since insect-scale drones operate under extremely limited area/power budget, continuous localization using GMM models entails much higher operating energy, thereby limiting flying duration and/or size of the drone due to a larger battery. Addressing the computational challenges of localization in an insect-scale drone using a CIM approach, we propose a novel framework of 3-D map representation using a harmonic mean of the ``Gaussian-like'' mixture (HMGM) model. We show that short-circuit current of a multiinput floating-gate CMOS-based inverter follows the harmonic mean of a Gaussian-like function. Therefore, the likelihood function useful for drone localization can be efficiently implemented by connecting many multiinput inverters in parallel, each programmed with the parameters of the 3-D map model represented as HMGM. When the depth measurements are projected to the input of the implementation, the summed current of the inverters emulates the likelihood of the measurement. We have characterized our approach on an RGB-D scenes dataset. The proposed localization framework is ~25x energy-efficient than the traditional, 8-bit digital GMM-based processor paving the way for tiny autonomous drones.