FastCycle: A Message Sharing Framework for Modular Automated Driving Systems

TL;DR

FastCycle is a lightweight, multi-threaded, zero-copy messaging framework designed to enhance modularity, real-time performance, and security in automated driving systems, outperforming existing middlewares.

Contribution

The paper introduces FastCycle, a novel messaging framework that improves data sharing efficiency and reduces latency in automated driving systems.

Findings

FastCycle achieves lower latency compared to popular middlewares.

FastCycle demonstrates improved real-time performance in ADS scenarios.

The framework is open sourced for community use and further development.

Abstract

Automated Driving Systems (ADS) have rapidly evolved in recent years and their architecture becomes sophisticated. Ensuring robustness, reliability and safety of performance is particularly important. The main challenge in building an ADS is the ability to meet certain stringent performance requirements in terms of both making safe operational decisions and finishing processing in real-time. Middlewares play a crucial role to handle these requirements in ADS. The way middlewares share data between the different system components has a direct impact on the overall performance, particularly the latency overhead. To this end, this paper presents FastCycle as a lightweight multi-threaded zero-copy messaging broker to meet the requirements of a high fidelity ADS in terms of modularity, real-time performance and security. We discuss the architecture and the main features of the proposed framework. Evaluation of the proposed framework based on standard metrics in comparison with popular middlewares used in robotics and automated driving shows the improved performance of our framework. The implementation of FastCycle and the associated comparisons with other frameworks are open sourced.