Enabling Level-4 Autonomous Driving on a Single $1k Off-the-Shelf Card

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that level-4 autonomous driving software can be run on a single $1k off-the-shelf GPU, significantly reducing costs and challenging existing assumptions about hardware requirements.

Contribution

It shows for the first time that full autonomous driving at level-4 can operate on a low-cost, off-the-shelf hardware platform, opening new avenues for affordable autonomous systems.

Findings

Level-4 autonomous driving software runs on Jetson AGX Xavier for under $1k.

Achieves all latency requirements with the proposed measures.

Challenges the perception that high-end hardware is necessary for level-4 autonomy.

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.