UC San Diego

Failures are unavoidable in engineered systems such as autonomous vehicles, butthe latency of recovering a failed component degrades the performance of autonomous vehicles. We proposed a scheme to reduce the time of recovering autonomous vehicles from failures. Using Linux kernel features and container technology, we containerize functional components of autonomous vehicles and periodically take checkpoints. After detecting a failure, we recover the failed component to a previous state, and we notify the rest of the system to coordinate with the recovery. We test our method using the Robot Operating System (ROS), a widely-used middleware for robots and autonomous driving vehicles. Our initial experimental results show that we reduced the recovery time of a practical pointcloud processing component in autonomous driving by 94%.