PIRT: A Runtime Framework to Enable Energy-Efficient Real-Time Robotic Applications on Heterogeneous Architectures
This addresses energy-efficient real-time robotic applications on heterogeneous architectures, offering a novel solution for mobile robotics developers.
The paper tackles the challenge of running diverse robotic tasks on mobile systems with strict energy constraints by introducing PIRT, a runtime framework that manages multiple accelerators to achieve simultaneous autonomous navigation at 25 FPS, obstacle detection at 3 FPS, and other tasks within an 11W power envelope.
Enabling full robotic workloads with diverse behaviors on mobile systems with stringent resource and energy constraints remains a challenge. In recent years, attempts have been made to deploy single-accelerator-based computing platforms (such as GPU, DSP, or FPGA) to address this challenge, but with little success. The core problem is two-fold: firstly, different robotic tasks require different accelerators, and secondly, managing multiple accelerators simultaneously is overwhelming for developers. In this paper, we propose PIRT, the first robotic runtime framework to efficiently manage dynamic task executions on mobile systems with multiple accelerators as well as on the cloud to achieve better performance and energy savings. With PIRT, we enable a robot to simultaneously perform autonomous navigation with 25 FPS of localization, obstacle detection with 3 FPS, route planning, large map generation, and scene understanding, traveling at a max speed of 5 miles per hour, all within an 11W computing power envelope.