DOI: https://doi.org/10.15368/theses.2020.37
Available at: https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/theses/2127
Date of Award
6-2020
Degree Name
MS in Electrical Engineering
Department/Program
Electrical Engineering
College
College of Engineering
Advisor
Joseph Callenes-Sloan
Advisor Department
Electrical Engineering
Advisor College
College of Engineering
Abstract
The introduction of autonomous vehicles has the potential to reduce the number of accidents and save countless lives. These benefits can only be realized if autonomous vehicles can prove to be safer than human drivers. There is a large amount of active research around developing robust algorithms for all parts of the autonomous vehicle stack including sensing, localization, mapping, perception, prediction, planning, and control. Additionally, some of these research projects have involved the use of the Robot Operating System (ROS). However, another key aspect of realizing an autonomous vehicle is a fault-tolerant design that can ensure the safe operation of the vehicle under unfavorable conditions.
The goal of this thesis is to evaluate the feasibility of adding a dedicated fault tolerance module into a ROS based architecture. The fault tolerance module is used to implement a safety controller that can take over safety-critical operations of the system when a fault is detected in the main computer. A Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC with a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 and an FPGA programmable logic region is chosen as the platform. The platform works in the Asymmetric Multiprocessing (AMP) configuration with a Linux based operating system on one core and a real-time operating system (RTOS) on the other. Results are gathered from an implementation done on a ROS based mobile robot platform.