🤖 AI Summary
Autonomous driving systems currently lack temporal analysis models and implementable software that jointly account for multi-rate asynchronous sensor streams and complex actuation chains, hindering guarantees of end-to-end timing correctness and functional safety. This work proposes, for the first time, a five-dimensional research gap framework—encompassing end-to-end latency, data freshness, temporal skew, probabilistic timing, and fail-safe mechanisms—from a co-design perspective of analytical models and system software. By integrating real-time scheduling theories (e.g., DAG-based and mixed-criticality systems), event- and time-triggered paradigms, ROS 2/Autoware architectures, communication optimizations, and runtime tracing techniques, the study systematically uncovers limitations in current approaches regarding constraint modeling, temporal metrics, resource abstraction, execution variability, and safety integration. The findings lay a theoretical and technical foundation for building a highly reliable temporal assurance framework for autonomous vehicles that is analyzable, observable, and deployable.
📝 Abstract
Autonomous driving (AD) systems continuously transform multi-rate and asynchronous sensor streams into vehicle actuation through graphs of callbacks, nodes, and middleware components. In such systems, temporal correctness cannot be characterized by the execution time or deadline of an individual task alone: localization and perception chains run in parallel, fuse data with different timestamps, converge at planning, and propagate through control to actuation. Moreover, the demand for high processing capability places AD systems on high-performance processors with multicore parallelism and GPU acceleration, where execution times vary strongly with the input scene, hardware state, and co-running work. Rare deadline misses at runtime therefore cannot be ruled out, and safety is preserved through fail-safe mechanisms such as the minimal-risk maneuver (MRM). This raises a two-sided question: what analytical models are needed to reason about timing in AD systems, and what system software is needed to realize, observe, and enforce those models on real platforms? On the analytical side, real-time research has evolved from periodic/sporadic tasks, directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), pipelines, mixed-criticality systems, and timer-/event-driven models toward end-to-end latency along cause-effect chains, data freshness, timing disparity, probabilistic timing, highest-criticality fail-safe operation, and early deadline-miss detection. On the system-software side, AD stacks and middleware, such as Autoware and ROS~2, expose both the opportunities and limitations of implementing analyzable timing behavior through executors, communication layers, tracing tools, and evaluation frameworks. This paper surveys these two lines of work and identifies the remaining gaps along five dimensions: units of timing constraints, timing metrics, resource models, execution-time variability, and safety integration...