Roofline Model for UAVs:A Bottleneck Analysis Tool for Designing Compute Systems for Autonomous Drones

Abstract: We present a bottleneck analysis tool for designing compute systems for autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). The tool provides insights by exploiting the fundamental relationships between various components in the autonomous UAV such as sensor, compute, body dynamics. To guarantee safe operation while maximizing the performance (e.g., velocity) of the UAV, the compute, sensor, and other mechanical properties must be carefully designed (or selected). The goal of our proposed tool is to provide a visual model which aids system architects to understand optimal compute design (or selection) for autonomous UAVs. The tool is available here: https://bit.ly/skyline-tool