On-Device Federated Continual Learning on RISC-V-based Ultra-Low-Power SoC for Intelligent Nano-Drone Swarms

RISC-V-based architectures are paving the way for efficient On-Device Learning (ODL) in smart edge devices. When applied across multiple nodes, ODL enables the creation of intelligent sensor networks that preserve data privacy. However, developing ODL-capable, battery-operated embedded platforms presents significant challenges due to constrained computational resources and limited device lifetime, besides intrinsic learning issues such as catastrophic forgetting. We face these challenges by proposing a regularization-based On-Device Federated Continual Learning algorithm tailored for multiple nano-drones performing face recognition tasks. We demonstrate our approach on a RISC-V-based 10-core ultra-low-power SoC, optimizing the ODL computational requirements. We improve the classification accuracy by 24% over naive fine-tuning, requiring 178 ms per local epoch and 10.5 s per global epoch, demonstrating the effectiveness of the architecture for this task.

@article{kröger2025_2503.17436,
  title={ On-Device Federated Continual Learning on RISC-V-based Ultra-Low-Power SoC for Intelligent Nano-Drone Swarms },
  author={ Lars Kröger and Cristian Cioflan and Victor Kartsch and Luca Benini },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.17436},
  year={ 2025 }
}