Cooperative Perception in Future Cars

Title: Cooperative Perception in Future Cars: An Adaptive Swarm Intelligence Use CaseAbstract: The phenomenon of self-driving (autonomous) vehicles is a symbol of the grand re-emergence of artificial intelligence and robotics as a promising technology. The most general model of future vehicular transportation is that of artificially intelligent, connected, autonomous vehicles. From a commercial perspective, the dominant market potential at this point is that of wirelessly connected, cloud-backed autonomous and semi-autonomous land vehicles.
In this talk, we want to motivate the discussion around the task of designing efficient and resilient embedded SoCs in support of the above-mentioned vehicular swarm problem space [1]. Such an SoC would be composed of a mix of different processing elements (PEs): e.g. general-purpose cores and various types of special-purpose accelerators. Such a heterogeneous, multi-core architecture is well-established in the art as an energy-efficient execution paradigm. However, such hardware-level heterogeneity generally presents itself as a difficult programmability challenge from a user perspective.
The Domain-Specific SoC (or DSSoC) program under DARPA MTO’s Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI), is concerned with the problem of designing easily programmable, yet efficient SoCs (for an identified application domain) at low development cost. The IBM-led project under DSSoC is called: “EPOCHS: Efficient Programmability of Cognitive Heterogeneous Systems,” in which our chosen application domain is that represented by intelligent, connected autonomous vehicles. In this talk, we present the novel elements of the EPOCHS approach to agile SoC design. The strategy is to meet the programmability and efficiency metrics with the help of smart system software, supported where needed, by customized hooks in hardware.
[1] A. Vega, A. Buyuktosunoglu, P. Bose. “Towards “Smarter” Vehicles Through Cloud-Backed Swarm Cognition,” Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 2018: 1079-1086.
Bio: Augusto Vega is a Research Staff Member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center involved in research and development work in the areas of highly-reliable power-efficient embedded designs, cognitive systems and mobile computing. He is a promoter of the Adaptive Swarm Intelligence paradigm with potential application in autonomous/connected vehicles, drones, wearable devices, mobile health monitoring and cyber-physical systems. He has several pending/issued patents and published papers and has served on conference technical program committees in the area of highly-reliable power-efficient systems. Dr. Vega holds Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees from Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC, Spain), and a B.Eng. degree from University of Buenos Aires (UBA, Argentina).