Towards Autonomous Architetures : An Automotive Perspective
Sagar Sudhir Behere, Björn Liljeqvist · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2012
The use of embedded computers in modern automobiles is enabling increasingly autonomous features. Electronic power train management and applications in active safety, cooperative driving and navigation show an underlying trend of the transfer of responsibilities from the human driver to a vehicle's (semi-)autonomous subsystems. The logical culmination ofthis trend would be a completely autonomous vehicle. How should existing vehicle architectures be evolved to sustain the development and growth of autonomous functions? We explore the principal problems with existing architectures, caused due to ad hoc addition of (semi-) autonomous features and argue that it is time to rethink automotive architectures from an autonomous systems perspective. We introduce a pattern that can help architects and designers to think in terms of autonomy and suggest where the application of autonomous systems thinking should begin, in the context of architecture development.