Coarse-Grained Computation-Oriented Energy Modeling for Heterogeneous Parallel Embedded Systems

Abstract

Limited energy availability is among the most challenging considerations developers face for heterogeneous systems and is critical for battery-powered devices. For complex systems composed of mechanical and computational units, such as drones and mobile robots, more than half of the power consumption can be due to the computational operations. Critically, these systems are often composed of many components, interacting concurrently to achieve specific functionality. As a result, power prediction and estimation can be a challenging task, especially if different computational units, such as CPU and GPU, should be modeled. In this paper, we focus on limited energy availability for mobile heterogeneous devices powered by a battery and present a coarse-grained computation-oriented energy modeling approach. Our approach predicts the energy consumption of a set of software components, in a specific configuration, executed according to a given scheduling policy. The model, determined numerically from several empirical power samples, describes the energy consumed by a software configuration and can be used for energy-aware planning and optimization from a computational point of view. It can potentially support a complex embedded system in maximizing the level of autonomy while minimizing power consumption and preserving the most appropriate amount of battery charge by finding the right rate of quality of service. Our approach is supported and validated by the design and implementation of a profiling tool. The tool abstracts computational energy behavior and describes the current battery drain as a function of all the admissible configurations.

Energy-Aware Design of Vision-Based Autonomous Tracking and Landing of a UAV

“…By doing so, a different QoS can be chosen for each algorithm. We use powprofiler, a generic energy modeling tool [17], to measure the energy impact of different configurations of the ROS-based system implementing the agricultural use-case. The powprofiler tool is part of the TeamPlay toolchain, which aims to make tradeoffs between energy and other nonfunctional properties accessible to the developer.…”

“…Energy-aware design using powprofiler relies on empirical experiments to measure the actual power consumption on the robot hardware [17]. In this paper, we focus on profiling the energy usage of the companion computer, which from the point of view of energy consumption can be studied independently from the specific drone it is mounted in.…”

“…1) Automatically using powprofiler to control the experiment execution [17]. For a ROS-based system, we assume that the algorithms are wrapped as ROS nodes, and we require the developer to declare the QoS parameters.…”

Mechanical and Computational Energy Estimation of a Fixed-Wing Drone

“…Drones energy efficiency specifically have been also studied in the literature, as drones are typically known to be very battery dependent [4]. Most researchers focused in the past on mechanical energy, with little or none contribution on computation.…”

“…Our approach is implemented in a profiling tool named powprofiler. 1 The tool, written in C++ and distributed under MIT license, has been further extended from [2], [4] to support the mechanical energy model described in this paper, as energy estimation of mobile robots often requires an expected energy value as a function of the mission time. The current implementation allows deriving an energy model that includes, but is not limited to, SoC from an arbitrary number of software components and a given flight mission.…”