Towards the Simulation Based Design and Validation of Mobile Robotic Cyber-Physical Systems

摘要

Mobile robotic cyber-physical systems tend to be made using an ad-hoc combination of off-the-shelf components for onboard computational needs. The number and type of sensors present, the number and organization of the onboard processors, and the algorithms utilized for processing highbandwidth real-time sensor data present researchers and designers with a wide range of choices for which they are currently ill-equipped to evaluate the best options. We present a co-simulation framework that allows for the system level power and performance analysis of robotic CPS with arange of onboard sensors. We characterize an embedded computer model using a popular benchmark and use this embedded system model in a simulated unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). We then validate the simulation framework by modeling a quadrotor UAV operating in a virtual testbed with the modeledembedded computer executing an image processing kernel. Results show that our embedded system model performance is accurate to within 7% of real world values. Quadrotor image processing performance is shown to be limited by the movement of sensor data in the onboard computer. This high bandwidthdata movement also dominates the power consumption.