Localization and Neural Splatting on the Edge: An FPGA Scene Memory for Robots

Que Haohua, Mingkai Liu, Handong Yao

Resource-constrained robots and autonomous vehicles need scene memories that localize a camera and render nearby views without a desktop GPU. Scene-coordinate regression (SCR) and 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) fit because they avoid an SfM stage, but ACEsplat-style pipelines are GPU-centered, and moving them to an edge FPGA is hard because SCR is pose-sensitive and 3DGS rendering is irregular and capacity-sensitive. We present LENS, an edge scene-memory acceleration system on the AMD KR260 that brings an ACEsplat-style workload to a low-power FPGA/ARM platform. Rather than proposing a new scene model, LENS co-designs the two dominant kernels with the board data path: an INT16 SCR accelerator that preserves pose accuracy, and a bit-exact fixed-point ordered 3DGS renderer that rewrites alpha transmittance as a log-sum-exp recurrence and removes provably useless streamed Gaussians. All LENS latency, power, and quality results are board-measured. The SCR engine preserves DSAC* localization accuracy at 25.42 ms, the on-board renderer reaches 34.11 dB on Cambridge against ACEsplat's 33.20, novel-view synthesis on RealEstate10K reaches 27.84 dB against 26.11, and all ten Wayspots scenes…