Wrapping up her successful Summer coop project, Adwita Kashyap presented her work today at the Faculty’s Summer Research Showcase. Finishing only her first year in the engineering program, Adwita developed a digital twin of an autonomous vehicle, including the design and implementation of the cyber-physical architecture, the high-reliability communication middleware, and digital twin services that allow for computation off-loading to bypass the computation limits of the resource-constrained physical component, such as AI-driven object detection and path planning.
Through her precise work and proactive approach, Adwita truly exceeded every expectation. We are looking forward to continuing the work in the Fall term.
Abstract. Digital twins play an important role in systems in which computing is to be off-loaded to a cloud infrastructure, e.g., due to resource constraints of the physical system. Pertinent examples are autonomous vehicles which require substantial computing power to perform advanced tasks, such as AI-enabled object detection. However, the architectural preferences, technological choices, task off-loading strategies, and safety mechanisms in automotive digital twins are currently not well understood. To investigate such issues, in this work, we develop a digital twin of an autonomous scale vehicle, capable of AI-enabled object detection, path computation, and the subsequent control of the vehicle along the computed path. We rely on state-of-the-art technology, including the lightweight ZeroMQ communication middleware and the YOLO convolutional neural network-based real-time object detection system. This project contributes to the rapidly growing field of safety-critical digital twins, and serves as a case study for multiple research projects in the host lab.
