A Power-and performance-Aware software framework for control system applications

Abstract

© 1968-2012 IEEE. This article describes the development of a software architectural framework for implementing compute-Aware control systems, where the term 'compute-Aware' describes controllers that can modify existing low-level computing platform power managers in response to the needs of the physical system controller. This level of interaction means that high-level decisions can be made as to when to operate the computing platform in a power-savings mode or a high-performance mode in response to situation awareness of the physical system. The framework is demonstrated experimentally on a mobile robot platform. In this example, a situation-Aware governor is developed that adjusts the speed of the processor based on the physical performance of the robot as it traverses a path through obstacles. The results show that the situation-Aware governor results in overall power savings of up to 38.9 percent with 1.3 percent degradation in performance compared to the static high-power strategy.