DAVOS: An Autonomous Vehicle Operating System in the Vehicle Computing Era

Vehicle computing represents a fundamental shift in how autonomous vehicles are designed and deployed, transforming them from isolated transportation systems into mobile computing platforms that support both safety-critical, real-time driving and data-centric services. In this setting, vehicles simultaneously support real-time driving pipelines and a growing set of data-driven applications, placing increased responsibility on the vehicle operating system to coordinate computation, data movement, storage, and access. These demands highlight recurring system considerations related to predictable execution, data and execution protection, efficient handling of high-rate sensor data, and long-term system evolvability, commonly summarized as Safety, Security, Efficiency, and Extensibility (SSEE). Existing vehicle operating systems and runtimes address these concerns in isolation, resulting in fragmented software stacks that limit coordination between autonomy workloads and vehicle data services. This paper presents DAVOS, the Delaware Autonomous Vehicle Operating System, a unified vehicle operating system architecture designed for the vehicle computing context. DAVOS provides a cohesive operating system foundation that supports both real-time autonomy and extensible vehicle computing within a single system framework.

ICAT: An Indoor Connected and Autonomous Testbed for Vehicle Computing

Indoor autonomous driving testbeds have emerged to complement expensive outdoor testbeds and virtual simulations, offering scalable and cost-effective solutions for research in navigation, traffic optimization, and swarm intelligence. However, they often lack the robust sensing and computing infrastructure for advanced research. Addressing these limitations, we introduce the Indoor Connected Autonomous Testbed (ICAT), a platform that not only tackles the unique challenges of indoor autonomous driving but also innovates vehicle computing and V2X communication. Moreover, ICAT leverages digital twins through CARLA and SUMO simulations, facilitating both centralized and decentralized autonomy deployments.