Computationally Efficient FPGA-based Large Language Model Inference for Real-Time Decision-Making in Robotic Systems

Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into modern robotic systems presents significant computational and energy constraint challenges, particularly for human-centered robotic applications. This paper presents a novel hardware optimization technique for deploying LLMs on resource-constrained embedded devices, achieving an up to 77% reduction in computational latency through an FPGA implementation in comparison to other popular embedded computing devices (e.g., CPU and GPUs). Additionally, we demonstrate our methodology by deploying a LLaMA 2-7B model on a Unitree Go2 robotic dog integrated with the proposed FPGA platform. The proposed optimization framework preserves real-time interaction capabilities while significantly reducing computational and energy overhead, facilitating efficient natural language processing for human-robot interaction in safety-critical and dynamic environments. Experimental results demonstrate that the FPGA-based LLaMA 2-7B implementation achieves up to 6.06-fold and 1.95-fold higher throughput compared to baseline CPU and GPU implementations while maintaining comparable inference accuracy. Furthermore, the proposed FPGA design surpasses existing state-of-the-art FPGA implementations, delivering a 30% improvement in computational efficiency.