On the Necessity of Real-Time Principles in GPU-Driven Autonomous Robots

Robot autonomy is driving an ever-increasing demand for computational power, including on-board multi-core CPUs and accelerators such as GPUs, to enable fast perception, planning, control, and more. Careful scheduling of these computational tasks on the CPU cores and GPUs is important to prevent locking up the finite computational capacity in ways that hinder other critical workloads; delays in computing time-critical tasks like obstacle detection and control can have huge negative consequences for autonomous robots, potentially resulting in damage, substantial financial loss, or even loss of life. In this paper, we leverage recent advances from real-time systems research. We apply TimeWall, a component-based real-time framework, to the computational components of an autonomous drone and experimentally show that the timeliness and safe operation properties of a drone are preserved even in the presence of increasing interfering computational processes.