RoboRun: A Robot Runtime to Exploit Spatial Heterogeneity
The limited onboard energy of autonomous mobile robots poses a tremendous
challenge for practical deployment. Hence, efficient computing solutions are
imperative. A crucial shortcoming of state-of-the-art computing solutions is
that they ignore the robot's operating environment heterogeneity and make
static, worst-case assumptions. As this heterogeneity impacts the system's
computing payload, an optimal system must dynamically capture these changes in
the environment and adjust its computational resources accordingly. This paper
introduces RoboRun, a mobile-robot runtime that dynamically exploits the
compute-environment synergy to improve performance and energy. We implement
RoboRun in the Robot Operating System (ROS) and evaluate it on autonomous
drones. We compare RoboRun against a state-of-the-art static design and show
4.5X and 4X improvements in mission time and energy, respectively, as well as a
36% reduction in CPU utilization.
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