Moving Forward: A Review of Autonomous Driving Software and Hardware Systems

With their potential to significantly reduce traffic accidents, enhance road safety, optimize traffic flow, and decrease congestion, autonomous driving systems are a major focus of research and development in recent years. Beyond these immediate benefits, they offer long-term advantages in promoting sustainable transportation by reducing emissions and fuel consumption. Achieving a high level of autonomy across diverse conditions requires a comprehensive understanding of the environment. This is accomplished by processing data from sensors such as cameras, radars, and LiDARs through a software stack that relies heavily on machine learning algorithms. These ML models demand significant computational resources and involve large-scale data movement, presenting challenges for hardware to execute them efficiently and at high speed. In this survey, we first outline and highlight the key components of self-driving systems, covering input sensors, commonly used datasets, simulation platforms, and the software architecture. We then explore the underlying hardware platforms that support the execution of these software systems. By presenting a comprehensive view of autonomous driving systems and their increasing demands, particularly for higher levels of autonomy, we analyze the performance and efficiency of scaled-up off-the-shelf GPU/CPU-based systems, emphasizing the challenges within the computational components. Through examples showcasing the diverse computational and memory requirements in the software stack, we demonstrate how more specialized hardware and processing closer to memory can enable more efficient execution with lower latency. Finally, based on current trends and future demands, we conclude by speculating what a future hardware platform for autonomous driving might look like.

VEDLIoT -- Next generation accelerated AIoT systems and applications

The VEDLIoT project aims to develop energy-efficient Deep Learning methodologies for distributed Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) applications. During our project, we propose a holistic approach that focuses on optimizing algorithms while addressing safety and security challenges inherent to AIoT systems. The foundation of this approach lies in a modular and scalable cognitive IoT hardware platform, which leverages microserver technology to enable users to configure the hardware to meet the requirements of a diverse array of applications. Heterogeneous computing is used to boost performance and energy efficiency. In addition, the full spectrum of hardware accelerators is integrated, providing specialized ASICs as well as FPGAs for reconfigurable computing. The project's contributions span across trusted computing, remote attestation, and secure execution environments, with the ultimate goal of facilitating the design and deployment of robust and efficient AIoT systems. The overall architecture is validated on use-cases ranging from Smart Home to Automotive and Industrial IoT appliances. Ten additional use cases are integrated via an open call, broadening the range of application areas.