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，各公司正在激烈竞争，以在其产品线中配备更复杂的自动驾驶功能，这场竞争的最终目标是在大众市场规模上实现完全自动驾驶。 ）首先实现这一目标的公司将处于主导地位，能够影响未来几十年自动驾驶相关能力的发展，这种高风险的竞争给自动驾驶关键技术（例如感知和技术）带来了快速创新的巨大压力。决策能力。导致了系统设计的“黑匣子”方法，使用现成的软件和硬件组件，最初用于其他环境，重新用于实现自动驾驶功能，这是使用最广泛的重新用途黑匣子组件之一。 ROS（机器人操作系统）使单独开发的软件程序能够实现不同的功能（例如基于摄像头的感知、正确的车道跟随等），从而形成一个提供更广泛功能的系统（例如汽车）。驱动不幸的是，正如其名称所暗示的那样，ROS 最初的设计和实现是为了支持机器人应用程序的开发，而机器人应用程序的要求与自动驾驶汽车截然不同，因此 ROS 缺乏确保安全汽车系统设计所需的功能。这里的问题是缺乏对确保实时安全的支持，即“按时”执行某些功能（例如制动）（例如，在遇到障碍物之前）。该项目旨在生产 ROS 的替代方案。这需要实时安全是首要考虑的问题。尽管它的名字如此，ROS实际上并不是一个操作系统（OS），而是一组用户级中间件库，有助于构建典型的机器人应用程序处理图。这些库支持模块化系统。通过图节点之间的消息通信的发布/订阅（pub/sub）概念进行开发，允许不同的软件包松散耦合，这种松散耦合实现了软件重用，这是 ROS 成功实现快速创新的关键。令人信服地展示了 pub/sub 在推动自动驾驶创新方面的重要性，但是，该项目正是针对这个问题，特别是在自动驾驶汽车中使用的多核+加速器平台的背景下。在一个平台上，仅使用 CPU 的多核计算机配备了图形处理单元 (GPU) 等协处理器，可以加速基于人工智能的自主软件中常见的某些数学计算。 ROS 的 pub/sub 替代方案提供实时安全认证的关键研究任务包括解决操作系统和中间件级别的基本资源分配问题、生成用于验证实时发布/订阅图中的响应时间界限的分析、生成参考发布/订阅中间件实现。 ，并通过实验将这种实现与 ROS 进行比较。虽然不断发展的 ROS 本身超出了该项目的范围，但该项目将揭示与这种发展相关的基本权衡。该奖项是 NSF 的法定使命，并且通过使用 ROS 的评估被认为值得支持。基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。