The Role of Compute in Autonomous Aerial Vehicles

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1906.10513
• Publication Date: 2019-01-01
• Authors: Boroujerdian, Behzad; Genc, Hasan; Krishnan, Srivatsan; Duisterhof, Bardi...; Plancher, Brian; Mansoorshahi, Kayvan; Almeida, Marcelino; Cui, Wenzhi; Faust, Aleksandra; Reddi, Vijay Janapa
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Robotics; 0209 industrial biotechnology; 02 engineering and technology; Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1905.06388<br/>Autonomous-mobile cyber-physical machines are part of our future. Specifically, unmanned-aerial-vehicles have seen a resurgence in activity with use-cases such as package delivery. These systems face many challenges such as their low-endurance caused by limited onboard-energy, hence, improving the mission-time and energy are of importance. Such improvements traditionally are delivered through better algorithms. But our premise is that more powerful and efficient onboard-compute should also address the problem. This paper investigates how the compute subsystem, in a cyber-physical mobile machine, such as a Micro Aerial Vehicle, impacts mission-time and energy. Specifically, we pose the question as what is the role of computing for cyber-physical mobile robots? We show that compute and motion are tightly intertwined, hence a close examination of cyber and physical processes and their impact on one another is necessary. We show different impact paths through which compute impacts mission-metrics and examine them using analytical models, simulation, and end-to-end benchmarking. To enable similar studies, we open sourced MAVBench, our tool-set consisting of a closed-loop simulator and a benchmark suite. Our investigations show cyber-physical co-design, a methodology where robot's cyber and physical processes/quantities are developed with one another consideration, similar to hardware-software co-design, is necessary for optimal robot design.<br/>