Agents of Autonomy: A Systematic Study of Robotics on Modern Hardware

Abstract

As robots increasingly permeate modern society, it is crucial for the system and hardware research community to bridge its long-standing gap with robotics. This divide has persisted due to the lack of (i) a systematic performance evaluation of robotics on different computing platforms and (ii) a comprehensive, open-source, cross-platform benchmark suite. To address these gaps, we present a systematic performance study of robotics on modern hardware and introduce RoWild, an open-source benchmark suite for robotics that is comprehensive and cross-platform. Our workloads encompass a broad range of robots, including driverless vehicles, pilotless drones, and stationary robotic arms, and we evaluate their performance on a spectrum of modern computing platforms, from low-end embedded CPUs to high-end server-grade GPUs. The source code of the benchmark suite is available in https://cmu-roboarch.github.io/rowild/. Our findings reveal that current architectures experience significant inefficiencies when executing robotic workloads, highlighting the need for architectural advancements that satisfy the primary requirements of robotic tasks. We discuss approaches for meeting these requirements, offering insights for improving the performance of robotics.