Thundershot: an open-source autonomous vehicles research platform for embedded heterogeneous MPSoCs

Modern autonomous vehicles require efficient and predictable hardware and software to guarantee a high level of safety. Meeting response time deadlines while processing large amounts of sensor data and maintaining a reasonable power consumption is a complex task on embedded devices. Hardware acceleration on FPGA fabric proposes itself as a predictable and certifiable solution to this problem. Research on embedded heterogeneous platforms, however, has a more complex development lifecycle. This paper presents a complete hardware/software platform for autonomous driving research on a commercial off-the-shelf Industrial-Grade FPGA-based MPSoC (an AMD KR260), with a particular focus on autonomous racing use-cases. On the software side, we release the first iteration of our open-source autonomous racing stack based on ROS2. Finally, we present a case-study on a hardware-accelerated 2D LiDAR localization pipeline, which is developed and integrated on the platform. The FPGA implementation provides a 2.64x speed-up over its host counterpart and is released as well as open hardware.