CPS: Synergy: Doing More With Less: Cost-Effective Infrastructure for Automotive Vision Capabilities

许多安全关键的网络物理系统依赖先进的传感能力来对不断变化的环境条件做出反应。汽车系统就是这样一个领域。在这一领域，不断扩大的自主功能(盲点警告、自动车道保持等)推动了先进传感器技术的激增。这种扩展的限制是完全自主，这已在各种一次性原型中得到证明，但代价是显著的硬件过度配置，这对于消费类产品来说是站不住脚的。为了在商用车中实现接近完全自动驾驶的功能，将需要软件基础设施，使多个传感器处理流能够以合理的成本多路传输到通用硬件平台上。该项目旨在开发这样的基础设施。所需的基础设施将通过专注于一个特别紧迫的挑战问题来开发：实现具有成本效益的驾驶员辅助和自动控制汽车功能，这些功能利用基于视觉的摄像头传感。这一问题将通过以下方式进行研究：(I)根据实际的汽车使用案例，在不同的固定价格点检查各种基于多核的硬件配置，以及(Ii)描述可使用待开发的软件基础设施可行地支持的基于视觉的工作负载的范围。即将进行的研究将由北卡罗来纳大学的学术研究人员和通用汽车研究公司的工程师共同参与。这一努力的合作性质增加了所获得的结果将对美国汽车业产生真正影响的可能性。此外，该项目预计将制作新的开放源码软件和工具、新的课程内容、通过参加北卡罗来纳大学的演示方案进行公众宣传以及调查员在国家和国际论坛上的讲座和研讨会。

Many safety-critical cyber-physical systems rely on advanced sensing capabilities to react to changing environmental conditions. One such domain is automotive systems. In this domain, a proliferation of advanced sensor technology is being fueled by an expanding range of autonomous capabilities (blind spot warnings, automatic lane-keeping, etc.). The limit of this expansion is full autonomy, which has been demonstrated in various one-off prototypes, but at the expensive of significant hardware over-provisioning that is not tenable for a consumer product. To enable features approaching full autonomy in a commercial vehicle, software infrastructure will be required that enables multiple sensor-processing streams to be multiplexed onto a common hardware platform at reasonable cost. This project is directed at the development of such infrastructure.The desired infrastructure will be developed by focusing on a particularly compelling challenge problem: enabling cost-effective driver-assist and autonomous-control automotive features that utilize vision-based sensing through cameras. This problem will be studied by (i) examining numerous multicore-based hardware configurations at various fixed price points based on realistic automotive use cases, and by (ii) characterizing the range of vision-based workloads that can be feasibly supported using the software infrastructure to be developed. The research to be conducted will be a collaboration involving academic researchers at UNC and engineers at General Motors Research. The collaborative nature of this effort increases the likelihood that the results obtained will have real impact in the U.S. automotive industry. Additionally, this project is expected to produce new open-source software and tools, new course content, public outreach through participation in UNC's demo program, and lectures and seminars by the investigators at national and international forums.