arXiv subjects

Yuankai He

Publications and source records attributed to Yuankai He.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

DAVOS: An Autonomous Vehicle Operating System in the Vehicle Computing Era

Vehicle computing represents a fundamental shift in how autonomous vehicles are designed and deployed, transforming them from isolated transportation systems into mobile computing platforms that support both safety-critical, real-time driving and data-centric services. In this setting, vehicles simultaneously support real-time driving pipelines and a growing set of data-driven applications, placing increased responsibility on the vehicle operating system to coordinate computation, data movement, storage, and access. These demands highlight recurring system considerations related to predictable execution, data and execution protection, efficient handling of high-rate sensor data, and long-term system evolvability, commonly summarized as Safety, Security, Efficiency, and Extensibility (SSEE). Existing vehicle operating systems and runtimes address these concerns in isolation, resulting in fragmented software stacks that limit coordination between autonomy workloads and vehicle data services. This paper presents DAVOS, the Dependable Autonomous Vehicle Operating System, a unified vehicle operating system architecture designed for the vehicle computing context. DAVOS provides a cohesive operating system foundation that supports both real-time autonomy and extensible vehicle computing within a single system framework.

cs.OS↗

arXiv2025

AVS: A Computational and Hierarchical Storage System for Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are evolving into mobile computing platforms, equipped with powerful processors and diverse sensors that generate massive heterogeneous data, for example 14 TB per day. Supporting emerging third-party applications calls for a general-purpose, queryable onboard storage system. Yet today's data loggers and storage stacks in vehicles fail to deliver efficient data storage and retrieval. This paper presents AVS, an Autonomous Vehicle Storage system that co-designs computation with a hierarchical layout: modality-aware reduction and compression, hot-cold tiering with daily archival, and a lightweight metadata layer for indexing. The design is grounded with system-level benchmarks on AV data that cover SSD and HDD filesystems and embedded indexing, and is validated on embedded hardware with real L4 autonomous driving traces. The prototype delivers predictable real-time ingest, fast selective retrieval, and substantial footprint reduction under modest resource budgets. The work also outlines observations and next steps toward more scalable and longer deployments to motivate storage as a first-class component in AV stacks.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

CARScenes: Semantic VLM Dataset for Safe Autonomous Driving

CAR-Scenes is a frame-level dataset for autonomous driving that enables training and evaluation of vision-language models (VLMs) for interpretable, scene-level understanding. We annotate 5,192 images drawn from Argoverse 1, Cityscapes, KITTI, and nuScenes using a 28-key category/sub-category knowledge base covering environment, road geometry, background-vehicle behavior, ego-vehicle behavior, vulnerable road users, sensor states, and a discrete severity scale (1-10), totaling 350+ leaf attributes. Labels are produced by a GPT-4o-assisted vision-language pipeline with human-in-the-loop verification; we release the exact prompts, post-processing rules, and per-field baseline model performance. CAR-Scenes also provides attribute co-occurrence graphs and JSONL records that support semantic retrieval, dataset triage, and risk-aware scenario mining across sources. To calibrate task difficulty, we include reproducible, non-benchmark baselines, notably a LoRA-tuned Qwen2-VL-2B with deterministic decoding, evaluated via scalar accuracy, micro-averaged F1 for list attributes, and severity MAE/RMSE on a fixed validation split. We publicly release the annotation and analysis scripts, including graph construction and evaluation scripts, to enable explainable, data-centric workflows for future intelligent vehicles. Dataset: https://github.com/Croquembouche/CAR-Scenes

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

A Survey of Driver Distraction and Inattention in Popular Commercial Software-Defined Vehicles

As the automotive industry embraces software-defined vehicles (SDVs), the role of user interface (UI) design in ensuring driver safety has become increasingly significant. In crashes related to distracted driving, over 90% did not involve cellphone use but were related to UI controls. However, many of the existing UI SDV implementations do not consider Drive Distraction and Inattention (DDI), which is reflected in many popular commercial vehicles. This paper investigates the impact of UI designs on driver distraction and inattention within the context of SDVs. Through a survey of popular commercial vehicles, we identify UI features that potentially increase cognitive load and evaluate design strategies to mitigate these risks. This survey highlights the need for UI designs that balance advanced software functionalities with driver-cognitive ergonomics. Findings aim to provide valuable guidance to researchers and OEMs to contribute to the field of automotive UI, contributing to the broader discussion on enhancing vehicular safety in the software-centric automotive era.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

A Faster and More Reliable Middleware for Autonomous Driving Systems

Ensuring safety in high-speed autonomous vehicles requires rapid control loops and tightly bounded delays from perception to actuation. Many open-source autonomy systems rely on ROS 2 middleware; when multiple sensor and control nodes share one compute unit, ROS 2 and its DDS transports add significant (de)serialization, copying, and discovery overheads, shrinking the available time budget. We present Sensor-in-Memory (SIM), a shared-memory transport designed for intra-host pipelines in autonomous vehicles. SIM keeps sensor data in native memory layouts (e.g., cv::Mat, PCL), uses lock-free bounded double buffers that overwrite old data to prioritize freshness, and integrates into ROS 2 nodes with four lines of code. Unlike traditional middleware, SIM operates beside ROS 2 and is optimized for applications where data freshness and minimal latency outweigh guaranteed completeness. SIM provides sequence numbers, a writer heartbeat, and optional checksums to ensure ordering, liveness, and basic integrity. On an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, SIM reduces data-transport latency by up to 98% compared to ROS 2 zero-copy transports such as FastRTPS and Zenoh, lowers mean latency by about 95%, and narrows 95th/99th-percentile tail latencies by around 96%. In tests on a production-ready Level 4 vehicle running Autoware.Universe, SIM increased localization frequency from 7.5 Hz to 9.5 Hz. Applied across all latency-critical modules, SIM cut average perception-to-decision latency from 521.91 ms to 290.26 ms, reducing emergency braking distance at 40 mph (64 km/h) on dry concrete by 13.6 ft (4.14 m).

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

An Advanced Framework for Ultra-Realistic Simulation and Digital Twinning for Autonomous Vehicles

Simulation is a fundamental tool in developing autonomous vehicles, enabling rigorous testing without the logistical and safety challenges associated with real-world trials. As autonomous vehicle technologies evolve and public safety demands increase, advanced, realistic simulation frameworks are critical. Current testing paradigms employ a mix of general-purpose and specialized simulators, such as CARLA and IVRESS, to achieve high-fidelity results. However, these tools often struggle with compatibility due to differing platform, hardware, and software requirements, severely hampering their combined effectiveness. This paper introduces BlueICE, an advanced framework for ultra-realistic simulation and digital twinning, to address these challenges. BlueICE's innovative architecture allows for the decoupling of computing platforms, hardware, and software dependencies while offering researchers customizable testing environments to meet diverse fidelity needs. Key features include containerization to ensure compatibility across different systems, a unified communication bridge for seamless integration of various simulation tools, and synchronized orchestration of input and output across simulators. This framework facilitates the development of sophisticated digital twins for autonomous vehicle testing and sets a new standard in simulation accuracy and flexibility. The paper further explores the application of BlueICE in two distinct case studies: the ICAT indoor testbed and the STAR campus outdoor testbed at the University of Delaware. These case studies demonstrate BlueICE's capability to create sophisticated digital twins for autonomous vehicle testing and underline its potential as a standardized testbed for future autonomous driving technologies.

cs.RO↗