Project Overview
Robotic systems such as unmanned autonomous drones and self-driving cars have been widely deployed in many scenarios and have the potential to revolutionize the future generation of computing. To improve the performance and energy efficiency of robotic platforms, significant research efforts are being devoted to developing hardware accelerators for workloads that form bottlenecks in the robotics software pipeline. Although domain-specific accelerators (DSAs) can offer im- proved efficiency over general-purpose processors on isolated robotics benchmarks, system-level constraints such as data move- ment and contention over shared resources could significantly impact the achievable acceleration in an end-to-end fashion. In addition, the closed-loop nature of robotic systems, where there is a tight interaction across different deployed environments, software stacks, and hardware architecture, further exacerbates the difficulties of evaluating robotic SoCs. To address this limitation, we develop ROSE, an open-source, hardware-software co-simulation infrastructure for full-stack, pre-silicon hardware- in-the-loop evaluation of robotics UAV SoCs, together with the full software stack and realistic robotic environments created to support robotics workloads. ROSE captures the complex interac- tions across hardware, algorithm, and environment, enabling new architectural research directions in hardware-software co-design for robotic UAV systems.