On Designing Computing Systems for Autonomous Vehicles: a PerceptIn Case Study

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of PerceptIn's autonomous vehicle computing system, highlighting design decisions and the benefits of offloading localization tasks to FPGA hardware, based on their development and operational experiences.

Contribution

It introduces a novel computing system design for autonomous vehicles, emphasizing FPGA-based offloading of localization workloads, informed by real-world deployment insights.

Findings

FPGA offloading improves localization efficiency

Design decisions enhance system performance and reliability

Operational experiences inform future system improvements

Abstract

PerceptIn develops and commercializes autonomous vehicles for micromobility around the globe. This paper makes a holistic summary of PerceptIn's development and operating experiences. This paper provides the business tale behind our product, and presents the development of the computing system for our vehicles. We illustrate the design decision made for the computing system, and show the advantage of offloading localization workloads onto an FPGA platform.