Pylot: A Modular Platform for Exploring Latency-Accuracy Tradeoffs in Autonomous Vehicles

Rapidly test self-driving car models and algorithms.

Pylot provides reference implementations for the models and algorithms underpinning a state-of-the-art autonomous driving pipeline. For components with a green check mark, Pylot also provides “perfect” implementations which access ground-truth information from the simulator.

Overview

• Autonomous vehicles are built as complex pipelines where changes to one component can impact the entire application.
• A more accurate object detection model with a greater runtime can worsen driving performance.
• Pylot enables end-to-end testing of new components by extending its state-of-the-art, modular pipeline which provides detailed debugging and development tools.

Abstract

We present Pylot, a platform for autonomous vehicle (AV) research and development, built with the goal to allow researchers to study the effects of the latency and accuracy of their models and algorithms on the end-to-end driving behavior of an AV. This is achieved through a modular structure enabled by our high-performance dataflow system that represents AV software pipeline components (object detectors, motion planners, etc.) as a dataflow graph of operators which communicate on data streams using timestamped messages. Pylot readily interfaces with popular AV simulators like CARLA, and is easily deployable to real-world vehicles with minimal code changes.

To reduce the burden of developing an entire pipeline for evaluating a single component, Pylot provides several state-of-the- art reference implementations for the various components of an AV pipeline. Using these reference implementations, a Pylot-based AV pipeline is able to drive a real vehicle, and attains a high score on the CARLA Autonomous Driving Challenge. We also present several case studies enabled by Pylot, including evidence of a need for context-dependent components, and per-component time allocation. Pylot is open source, with the code available at https://github.com/erdos-project/pylot.

Cite

@inproceedings{gog2021pylot,
  title={Pylot: A modular platform for exploring latency-accuracy tradeoffs in autonomous vehicles},
  author={Gog, Ionel and Kalra, Sukrit and Schafhalter, Peter and Wright, Matthew A and Gonzalez, Joseph E and Stoica, Ion},
  booktitle={2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  pages={8806--8813},
  year={2021},
  organization={IEEE}
}

*Equal contribution.