Modeling, Programming and Performance Analysis of Automotive Environment Map Representations on Embedded GPUs

Future Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) require the continuous computation of detailed maps of the vehicle’s environment. Due to the high demand of accuracy and the enormous amount of data to be fused and processed, common architectures used today, like single-core processors in automotive Electronic Control Units (ECUs), do not provide enough computing power. Here, emerging embedded multi-core architectures are appealing such as embedded Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). In this paper, we (a) identify and analyze common subalgorithms of ADAS algorithms for computing environment maps, such as interval maps, for suitability to be parallelized and run on embedded GPUs. From this analysis, (b) performance models are derived on achievable speedups with respect to sequential single-core CPU implementations. (c) As a third contribution of this paper, these performance models are validated by presenting and comparing a novel parallelized interval map GPU implementation against a parallel occupancy grid map implementation. For both types of environment maps, implementations on an Nvidia Tegra K1 prototype are compared to verify the correctness of the introduced performance models. Finally, the achievable speedups with respect to a single-core CPU solution are reported. These range from 3x to 275x for interval and grid map computations.