LoPECS: A Low-Power Edge Computing System for Real-Time Autonomous Driving Services

To simultaneously enable multiple autonomous driving services on affordable embedded systems, we designed and implemented LoPECS, a Low-Power Edge Computing System for real-time autonomous robots and vehicles services. The contributions of this paper are three-fold: first, we developed a Heterogeneity-Aware Runtime Layer to fully utilize vehicle's heterogeneous computing resources to fulfill the real-time requirement of autonomous driving applications; second, we developed a vehicle-edge Coordinator to dynamically offload vehicle tasks to edge cloudlet to further optimize user experience in the way of prolonged battery life; third, we successfully integrated these components into LoPECS system and implemented it on Nvidia Jetson TX1. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first complete edge computing system in a production autonomous vehicle. Our implementation on Nvidia Jetson demonstrated that it could successfully support multiple autonomous driving services with only 11 W of power consumption, and hence proves the effectiveness of the proposed LoPECS system.