Jiao: Bridging Isolation and Customization in Mixed Criticality Robotics
It addresses the expertise asymmetry problem for end-users modifying robot behavior on shared multicore platforms, enabling safe customization without deep systems knowledge.
The paper presents an architecture for mixed-criticality robotics that combines hardware-enforced isolation with user-customizable behavior, reducing cycle-period jitter by 84.5% and tail timing error from 69.0 μs to 7.8 μs.
Consumer robotics demands consolidation of safety-critical control, perception pipelines, and user applications on shared multicore platforms. While static partitioning hypervisors provide hardware-enforced isolation, directly transplanting automotive architectures encounters an expertise asymmetry problem in which end-users modifying robot behavior lack the systems knowledge that platform developers possess. We present an architecture addressing this challenge through three integrated components. A Safe IO Cell provides hardware-level override capability. A Parameter Synchronization Service encapsulates cross-domain complexity. A Safety Communication Layer implements IEC~61508-aligned verification. Our empirical evaluation on an ARM Cortex-A55 platform demonstrates that partition isolation reduces cycle-period jitter by 84.5\% and cuts tail timing error by nearly an order of magnitude (p99 $|$jitter$|$ from 69.0\,$μ$s to 7.8\,$μ$s), eliminating all $>$50\,$μ$s~excursions.