In plain words: A single $1,000 off-the-shelf card can run fully self-driving software by fixing the timing bottlenecks in how the driving pipeline is designed and optimized. It stays fast enough to react in time while costing an order of magnitude less than today's systems.
Abstract
Autonomous driving is of great interest in both research and industry. The high cost has been one of the major roadblocks that slow down the development and adoption of autonomous driving in practice. This paper, for the first-time, shows that it is possible to run level-4 (i.e., fully autonomous driving) software on a single off-the-shelf card (Jetson AGX Xavier) for less than $1k, an order of magnitude less than the state-of-the-art systems, while meeting all the requirements of latency. The success comes from the resolution of some important issues shared by existing practices through a series of measures and innovations. The study overturns the common perceptions of the computing resources required by level-4 autonomous driving, points out a promising path for the industry to lower the cost, and suggests a number of research opportunities for rethinking the architecture, software design, and optimizations of autonomous driving.
Hsin-Hsuan Sung, Yuanchao Xu, Jiexiong Guan, Wei Niu, Shaoshan Liu, Bin Ren, Yanzhi Wang, Xipeng Shen
arXiv:2110.06373 · cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG, eess.SY · submitted Oct 12, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · under conference review