Safety Island Actuation Demo

Introduction

The Safety Island Actuation Demo is an example application that shows how an Autonomous Drive software stack can be run in a compute environment composed of a high-performance Primary Compute platform coupled with a higher reliability Safety Island.

The Safety Island Actuation Demo features an “Actuation Service” application running on the Safety Island that receives inputs from the Primary Compute and generates control commands that can be passed to an actuation system. A reference implementation is provided by the Safety Island Actuation Demo. The software running on the Primary Compute is an Autoware pipeline and the “Actuation Service” takes the form of a Zephyr application showcasing the Pure Pursuit algorithm from Autoware.Auto. The two communicate via Data Distribution Service (DDS) messages over a network interface.

Safety Island Actuation Demo on Kronos

Compared to the default deployment of the Safety Island Actuation Demo, the Kronos deployment has, on the Primary Compute, an “Actuation Player” component instead of the Autoware pipeline and, on the Host, a “Packet Analyzer” instead of a visualization software. This is done in order to minimize the load for an FVP target.

This demo can run on both the Baremetal and Virtualization Architectures. In case of the Virtualization Architecture, the “Actuation Player” is deployed on DomU1.

The following diagram describes the data flow of the demo:

For more information on the underlying network topology, and the description of the network bridging involved in providing access to the external network, see the Memory Map section.

Main Components

The Actuation Demo on Kronos has 3 components:

Actuation Player
- Plays a recording of a driving scenario from the default deployment of the Actuation Demo
- Recipe at yocto/meta-kronos/recipes-demos/actuation/actuation-player_2.0.0.bb
Actuation Service
- Functionally the same as the “Actuation Service” from the default deployment of the Actuation Demo, except that the computed commands are sent through a BSD socket instead of a DDS connection
- Recipe at yocto/meta-kronos/recipes-kernel/zephyr-kernel/zephyr-actuation.bb
- Zephyr overlays at:
Packet Analyzer
- Checks for correctness of the “Actuation Service” output
- Recipe at yocto/meta-kronos/recipes-demos/actuation/packet-analyzer-native_2.0.0.bb

Communication Interfaces

Actuation Player <> Actuation Service

CycloneDDS (Using a specific upstream commit located at yocto/meta-kronos/recipes-demos/actuation/cyclonedds_0.10.3.inc) is used for the communication between the “Actuation Player” and the “Actuation Service”.

Actuation Service <> Packet Analyzer

BSD socket (TCP Protocol) is used in order to send the Control Commands from the “Actuation Service” to the “Packet Analyzer”.

Validation

Refer to the Actuation Demo validations Integration Tests Validating the Safety Island Actuation Demo