Jiao: Bridging Isolation and Customization in Mixed Criticality Robotics

TL;DR

This paper introduces an integrated architecture for mixed criticality robotics on shared multicore platforms, enhancing safety, isolation, and configurability with empirical performance improvements.

Contribution

It presents a novel architecture with three components that improve safety and configurability in mixed criticality robotics systems on multicore hardware.

Findings

Partition isolation reduces cycle-period jitter by 84.5%.

Tail timing error is cut by nearly an order of magnitude.

All excursions over 50 microseconds are eliminated.

Abstract

Consumer robotics demands consolidation of safety-critical control, perception pipelines, and user applications on shared multicore platforms. While static partitioning hypervisors provide hardware-enforced isolation, directly transplanting automotive architectures encounters an expertise asymmetry problem in which end-users modifying robot behavior lack the systems knowledge that platform developers possess. We present an architecture addressing this challenge through three integrated components. A Safe IO Cell provides hardware-level override capability. A Parameter Synchronization Service encapsulates cross-domain complexity. A Safety Communication Layer implements IEC~61508-aligned verification. Our empirical evaluation on an ARM Cortex-A55 platform demonstrates that partition isolation reduces cycle-period jitter by 84.5\% and cuts tail timing error by nearly an order of magnitude (p99 $|$jitter$|$ from 69.0\,$\mu$s to 7.8\,$\mu$s), eliminating all $>$50\,$\mu$s~excursions.