The advent of powerful edge devices and AI algorithms has already revolutionized many terrestrial applications; however, for both technical and historical reasons, the space industry is still striving to adopt these key enabling technologies in new mission concepts. In this context, the current work evaluates an heterogeneous multi-core system-on-chip processor for use on-board future spacecraft to support novel, computationally demanding digital signal processors and AI functionalities. Given the importance of low power consumption in satellites, we consider the Intel Movidius Myriad2 system-on-chip and focus on SW development and performance aspects. We design a methodology and framework to accommodate efficient partitioning, mapping, parallelization, code optimization, and tuning of complex algorithms. Furthermore, we propose an avionics architecture combining this commercial off-the-shelf chip with a field programmable gate array device to facilitate, among others, interfacing with traditional space instruments via SpaceWire transcoding. We prototype our architecture in the lab targeting vision-based navigation tasks. We implement a representative computer vision pipeline to track the 6D pose of ENVISAT using megapixel images during hypothetical spacecraft proximity operations. Overall, we achieve 2.6 to 4.9 FPS with only 0.8 to 1.1 W on Myriad2 , i.e., 10-fold acceleration versus modern rad-hard processors. Based on the results, we assess various benefits of utilizing Myriad2 instead of conventional field programmable gate arrays and CPUs.

中文翻译：

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使用边缘设备提高太空航空电子设备的性能-功耗-可编程性：Myriad2 SoC 上的 VBN

强大的边缘设备和人工智能算法的出现已经彻底改变了许多地面应用；然而，出于技术和历史原因，航天工业仍在努力在新的任务概念中采用这些关键的使能技术。在这种情况下，目前的工作评估了一种异构多核片上系统处理器，用于在未来的航天器上支持新颖的、计算要求高的数字信号处理器和人工智能功能。鉴于卫星低功耗的重要性，我们认为英特尔 Movidius Myriad2片上系统，专注于软件开发和性能方面。我们设计了一种方法和框架，以适应复杂算法的高效分区、映射、并行化、代码优化和调整。此外，我们提出了一种航空电子架构，将这种商用现货芯片与现场可编程门阵列设备相结合，以促进通过 SpaceWire 转码与传统空间仪器进行接口等。我们在实验室中对我们的架构进行原型设计，目标是基于视觉的导航任务。我们实现了一个具有代表性的计算机视觉管道，以在假设的航天器接近操作期间使用百万像素图像跟踪 ENVISAT 的 6D 姿势。总体而言，我们实现了 2.6 到 4.9 FPS，而只有 0.8 到 1.1 W无数2，即与现代抗辐射处理器相比，加速了 10 倍。根据结果​​，我们评估了利用无数2而不是传统的现场可编程门阵列和 CPU。