Characterizing self-driving tasks in general-purpose architectures

Abstract

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have the potential to radically change the automotive industry. How- ever, computing solutions for AVs have to meet severe performance constraints to guarantee a safe driving experience. Current solutions either exhibit high cost or fail to meet the stringent latency constraints. Therefore, the popularization of AVs requires a low-cost yet effective computing sys- tem. Understanding the sources of latency is key in order to improve autonomous driving systems. Here, we present a detailed characterization of Autoware, a modern self-driving car system. We analyze the performance of the different components and leverage hardware counters to identify the main bottlenecks.