Jean-Luc Gaudiot

This book is one of the first technical overviews of autonomous vehicles written for a general computing and engineering audience. The authors share their practical experiences designing autonomous vehicle systems. These systems are complex, consisting of three major subsystems: (1) algorithms for localization, perception, and planning and control; (2) client systems, such as the robotics operating system and hardware platform; and (3) the cloud platform, which includes data storage, simulation, high-definition (HD) mapping, and deep learning model training. The algorithm subsystem extracts meaningful information from sensor raw data to understand its environment and make decisions as to its future actions. The client subsystem integrates these algorithms to meet real-time and reliability requirements. The cloud platform provides offline computing and storage capabilities for autonomous vehicles. Using the cloud platform, new algorithms can be tested so as to update the HD map—in addition to training better recognition, tracking, and decision models. Since the first edition of this book was released, many universities have adopted it in their autonomous driving classes, and the authors received many helpful comments and feedback from readers. Based on this, the second edition was improved by extending and rewriting multiple chapters and adding two commercial test case studies. In addition, a new section entitled “Teaching and Learning from this Book” was added to help instructors better utilize this book in their classes. The second edition captures the latest advances in autonomous driving and that it also presents usable real-world case studies to help readers better understand how to utilize their lessons in commercial autonomous driving projects. This book should be useful to students, researchers, and practitioners alike. Whether you are an undergraduate or a graduate student interested in autonomous driving, you will find herein a comprehensive overview of the whole autonomous vehicle technology stack. If you are an autonomous driving practitioner, the many practical techniques introduced in this book will be of interest to you. Researchers will also find extensive references for an effective, deeper exploration of the various technologies.

Examines recent advances in design, modeling, and implementation of dataflow and multithreaded computers. The text contains reports concerning many of the world's leading projects engaged in the continuing evolution and application of dataflow concepts. It covers the broad range of dataflow principles in program representation -- from language design to processor architecture -- and compiler optimization techniques. The first section of the book delves into massively parallel distributed memory and multithreaded architecture design, synchronization and pipelined design, and superpipelined data-driven VLSI processors. The next section, on language and programming issues, discusses stream data types, the development of well-structured software, and coarse-grain dataflow programming. Other parts of the text study parallelization of dataflow programs, an analytical model for the behavior of dataflow graphs, compare a centralized work distribution scheme with a distributed scheme, and present a comprehensive approach to understanding workload management schemes. Altogether, the book introduces the reader to dataflow concepts that show how functional programming ideas can be harnessed to exploit the power of parallel computing.