No Arabic abstract
After decades of uninterrupted progress and growth, information technology has so evolved that it can be said we are entering the age of autonomous machines, but there exist many roadblocks in the way of making this a reality. In this article, we make a preliminary attempt at recognizing and categorizing the technical and non-technical challenges of autonomous machines; for each of the ten areas we have identified, we review current status, roadblocks, and potential research directions. It is hoped that this will help the community define clear, effective, and more formal development goalposts for the future.
Building domain-specific accelerators for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is challenging due to a lack of systematic methodology for designing onboard compute. Balancing a computing system for a UAV requires considering both the cyber (e.g., sensor rate, compute performance) and physical (e.g., payload weight) characteristics that affect overall performance. Iterating over the many component choices results in a combinatorial explosion of the number of possible combinations: from 10s of thousands to billions, depending on implementation details. Manually selecting combinations of these components is tedious and expensive. To navigate the {cyber-physical design space} efficiently, we introduce emph{AutoPilot}, a framework that automates full-system UAV co-design. AutoPilot uses Bayesian optimization to navigate a large design space and automatically select a combination of autonomy algorithm and hardware accelerator while considering the cross-product effect of other cyber and physical UAV components. We show that the AutoPilot methodology consistently outperforms general-purpose hardware selections like Xavier NX and Jetson TX2, as well as dedicated hardware accelerators built for autonomous UAVs, across a range of representative scenarios (three different UAV types and three deployment environments). Designs generated by AutoPilot increase the number of missions on average by up to 2.25x, 1.62x, and 1.43x for nano, micro, and mini-UAVs respectively over baselines. Our work demonstrates the need for holistic full-UAV co-design to achieve maximum overall UAV performance and the need for automated flows to simplify the design process for autonomous cyber-physical systems.
Recent researches on robotics have shown significant improvement, spanning from algorithms, mechanics to hardware architectures. Robotics, including manipulators, legged robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles, are now widely applied in diverse scenarios. However, the high computation and data complexity of robotic algorithms pose great challenges to its applications. On the one hand, CPU platform is flexible to handle multiple robotic tasks. GPU platform has higher computational capacities and easy-touse development frameworks, so they have been widely adopted in several applications. On the other hand, FPGA-based robotic accelerators are becoming increasingly competitive alternatives, especially in latency-critical and power-limited scenarios. With specialized designed hardware logic and algorithm kernels, FPGA-based accelerators can surpass CPU and GPU in performance and energy efficiency. In this paper, we give an overview of previous work on FPGA-based robotic accelerators covering different stages of the robotic system pipeline. An analysis of software and hardware optimization techniques and main technical issues is presented, along with some commercial and space applications, to serve as a guide for future work.
The commercialization of autonomous machines is a thriving sector, and likely to be the next major computing demand driver, after PC, cloud computing, and mobile computing. Nevertheless, a suitable computer architecture for autonomous machines is missing, and many companies are forced to develop ad hoc computing solutions that are neither scalable nor extensible. In this article, we analyze the demands of autonomous machine computing, and argue for the promise of dataflow architectures in autonomous machines.
Legged robots have been shown to be effective in navigating unstructured environments. Although there has been much success in learning locomotion policies for quadruped robots, there is little research on how to incorporate human knowledge to facilitate this learning process. In this paper, we demonstrate that human knowledge in the form of LTL formulas can be applied to quadruped locomotion learning within a Reward Machine (RM) framework. Experimental results in simulation show that our RM-based approach enables easily defining diverse locomotion styles, and efficiently learning locomotion policies of the defined styles.
Due to the complex and dynamic character of intersection scenarios, the autonomous driving strategy at intersections has been a difficult problem and a hot point in the research of intelligent transportation systems in recent years. This paper gives a brief summary of state-of-the-art autonomous driving strategies at intersections. Firstly, we enumerate and analyze common types of intersection scenarios, corresponding simulation platforms, as well as related datasets. Secondly, by reviewing previous studies, we have summarized characteristics of existing autonomous driving strategies and classified them into several categories. Finally, we point out problems of the existing autonomous driving strategies and put forward several valuable research outlooks.