CPS: Medium: GOALI: Enabling Safe Innovation for Autonomy: Making Publish/Subscribe Really Real-Time

CPS：中：GOALI：实现自主安全创新：使发布/订阅真正实时

• 批准号: 2333120
• 负责人: James Anderson
• 金额: $ 120万
• 依托单位: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2024-01-01 至 2026-12-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2333120&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CPS; Medium; GOALI; Enabling; Safe

In the automotive industry today, companies are fiercely competing to field ever more sophisticated autonomous features in their product lines. The hoped-for culmination of this competition is full autonomy at mass-market scales. The stakes here are high: the companies (and countries) that get there first will be in a commanding position to influence how autonomy-related capabilities evolve for decades to come. This high-stakes competition has resulted in significant pressure to innovate quickly with respect to key technologies for autonomous driving, such as perception and decision-making capabilities. This pressure has led to a “black-box” approach to system design, with off-the-shelf software and hardware components, originally intended for other contexts, repurposed to implement autonomous-driving functions. One of the most widely used repurposed black-box components is ROS (the Robot Operating System). ROS enables separately developed software programs that implement different functions (e.g., camera-based perception, correct lane following, etc.) to be combined to form a system that provides broader capabilities (e.g., a car that drives itself). Unfortunately, as its name suggests, ROS was originally designed and implemented to support the development of robotics applications, which have very different requirements from autonomous vehicles. As a result, ROS lacks features needed to ensure safe automotive system designs. A key issue here is a lack of support for ensuring real-time safety, i.e., that certain functions (e.g., braking) are performed “on time” (e.g., before an obstacle is hit). This project is directed at producing an alternative to ROS that takes real-time safety as a first-class concern.Despite its name, ROS is really not an operating system (OS) but rather a set of user-level middleware libraries that facilitate constructing processing graphs typical of robotics applications. These libraries support modular system development via a publish/subscribe (pub/sub) notion of message communication between graph nodes that allows different software packages to be loosely coupled. This loose coupling enables software reuse, which has been a key to ROS’s success in enabling rapid innovation. ROS’s success convincingly demonstrates the importance of pub/sub in fueling innovation in autonomy. However, pub/sub must be safe to apply. This project is directed at this very issue, specifically in the context of multicore+acclerator platforms as used in autonomous vehicles. In such a platform, a CPU-only multicore computer is augmented with co-processors like graphics processing units (GPUs) that can speed up certain mathematical computations that commonly occur in AI-based software for autonomy. The specific aim of this project is to produce a pub/sub alternative to ROS that facilities real-time safety certification. Key research tasks include resolving fundamental resource-allocation concerns at the OS and middleware levels, producing analysis for validating response-time bounds in real-time pub/sub graphs, producing a reference pub/sub middleware implementation, and experimentally comparing this implementation to ROS. While evolving ROS itself is beyond the scope of this project, this project will expose fundamental tradeoffs of relevance to such an evolution.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

在当今的汽车行业中，公司正在激烈竞争产品线中更加复杂的自主功能。这项竞赛的最高峰是大众市场量表的完全自主权。这里的赌注很高：首先到达那里的公司（和国家）将处于主导地位，以影响与自治相关的能力几十年来的发展。这场高风险竞争已导致对自动驾驶的关键技术（例如感知和决策能力）的关键技术迅速产生了巨大的创新压力。这种压力导致了系统设计的“黑框”方法，该方法具有现成的软件和硬件组件，最初是针对其他上下文的，用于实施自动驾驶功能。使用最广泛的重新利用的黑盒组件之一是ROS（机器人操作系统）。 ROS启用了单独开发的软件程序，该软件程序可以组合使用不同功能（例如，基于相机的感知，正确的车道等），以形成一个提供更广泛功能的系统（例如，驱动自身的汽车）。不幸的是，顾名思义，ROS最初是为支持机器人应用程序开发而设计和实施的，这些应用程序与自动驾驶汽车的要求截然不同。结果，ROS缺乏确保安全汽车系统设计所需的功能。这里的一个关键问题是缺乏确保实时安全性的支持，即“按时”执行某些功能（例如制动）（例如，在遇到障碍之前）。该项目旨在生产ROS的替代方案，该替代方案将实时安全性作为一流的关注点。尽管如此，ROS确实不是操作系统（OS），而是一组用户级中间件库，这些库可以促进构造Robotics应用程序典型的处理图。这些库通过出版/订阅（pub/sub）在图节点之间进行消息通信的概念支持模块化系统开发，该图形节点允许将不同的软件包松散耦合。这种松散的耦合使软件重复使用，这是ROS在实现快速创新方面取得成功的关键。 Ros的成功令人信服地证明了Pub/Sub在加油自治方面的重要性。但是，酒吧/sub必须安全申请。该项目针对这个问题，特别是在自动驾驶汽车中使用的多核+acclerator平台的背景下。在这样的平台中，仅使用CPU的多功能计算机与图形处理单元（GPU）之类的处理器增强，这些处理器可以加快在基于AI的自主权软件中通常发生的某些数学计算。该项目的具体目的是生产ROS的酒吧/子替代品，以实时安全认证。关键的研究任务包括在OS和中间件级别上解决的基本资源分配问题，对实时酒吧/子图中验证响应时间界限进行分析，产生参考酒吧/子中间件实现，并在实验上比较此实现与ROS。尽管不断发展的ROS本身超出了该项目的范围，但该项目将使与此类演变相关的基本权衡取决于基本的权衡。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是通过基金会的知识分子和更广泛影响的评估标准来通过评估而被视为珍贵的支持。