CPS: Medium: GOALI: Design Automation for Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems

This project aims to transform the software development process in modern cars, which are witnessing significant innovation with many new autonomous functions being introduced, culminating in a fully autonomous vehicle. Most of these new features are indeed implemented in software, at the heart of which lies several control algorithms. Such control algorithms operate in a feedback loop, involving sensing the state of the plant or the system to be controlled, computing a control input, and actuating the plant in order to enforce a desired behavior on it. Examples of this range from brake and engine control, to cruise control, automated parking, and to fully autonomous driving. Current development flows start with mathematically designing a controller, followed by implementing it in software on the embedded systems existing in a car. This flow has worked well in the past, where automotive embedded systems were simple – with few processors, communication buses, and simple sensors. The control algorithms were simple as well, and important functions were largely implemented by mechanical subsystems. But modern cars have over 100 processors connected by several miles of cables, and multiple sensors like cameras, radars and lidars, whose data needs complex processing before it can be used by a controller. Further, the control algorithms themselves are also more complex since they need to implement new autonomous features that did not exist before. As a result, both computation, communication, and memory accesses in such a complex hardware/software system can now be organized in many different ways, with each being associated with different tradeoffs in accuracy, timing, and resource requirements. These in turn have considerable impact on control performance and how the control strategy needs to be designed. As a result, the clear separation between designing the controller, followed by implementing it in software in the car, no longer works well. This project aims to develop both the theoretical foundations and the tool support to adapt this design flow to emerging automotive control strategies and embedded systems. This will not only result in more cost-effective design of future cars, but will also help with certifying the implemented controllers, thereby leading to safer autonomous cars.

In particular, the goal is to automate the synthesis and implementation of control algorithms on distributed embedded architectures consisting of different types of multicore processors, GPUs, FPGA-based accelerators, different communication buses, gateways, and sensors associated with compute-intensive processing. Starting with specifications of plants, control objectives, controller templates, and a partially-specified implementation architecture, this project seeks to synthesize both controller and implementation architecture parameters that meet all control objectives and resource constraints. Towards this, a variety of techniques from switched control, interface compatibility checking, and scheduling of multi-mode systems – that bring together control theory, real-time systems, program analysis, and mathematical optimization, will be used. In collaboration with General Motors, this project will build a tool chain that integrates controller design tools like Matlab/Simulink with standard embedded systems design and configuration tools. This project will demonstrate the benefits of this new design flow and tool support by addressing a set of challenge problems from General Motors.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.