RoSÉ: A Hardware-Software Co-Simulation Infrastructure Enabling Pre-Silicon Full-Stack Robotics SoC Evaluation
Dima Nikiforov
, Shengjun Chris Dong, Chengyi Lux Zhang, Seah Kim, Borivoje Nikolic, Yakun Sophia Shao
Robotic systems, such as autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and self-driving cars, have been widely deployed in many scenarios and have the potential to revolutionize the future generation of computing. To improve the performance and energy efficiency of robotic platforms, significant research efforts are being devoted to developing hardware accelerators for workloads that form bottlenecks in the robotics software pipeline. Although domain-specific accelerators can offer improved efficiency over general-purpose processors on isolated robotics benchmarks, system-level constraints such as data movement and contention over shared resources can significantly impact the achievable end-to-end acceleration. In addition, the closed-loop nature of robotic systems, where there is a tight interaction across different deployed environments, software stacks, and hardware architecture, further exacerbates the difficulties of evaluating robotics SoCs.
To address this limitation, we develop RoSÉ, an open-source, hardware-software co-simulation infrastructure for full-stack, pre-silicon hardware-in-the-loop evaluation of robotics SoCs, together with the full software stack and realistic environments created to support robotics workloads. RoSÉ captures the complex interactions across hardware, algorithm, and environment, enabling new architectural research directions in hardware-software co-design for robotic systems.