Safely scheduling offloading of computing tasks for an autonomous vehicle

Abstract

A local computing device of a vehicle receives a stream of sensor data from one or sensors of the vehicle. If a remote computing device is estimated to process the stream of sensor data and provide driving instructions within a maximum acceptable wait time, then the local computing device sends a request to the remote computing device to process the stream of sensor data and provide driving instructions. If the processing is estimated to meet or exceed the maximum acceptable wait time, then the local computing device uses a locally executed neural network to determine driving instructions. The driving instructions received either from the remote computing or from the local neural network are sent to an autonomous driving system of the vehicle. Offloading processing the sensor data to the remote computing device may result in the local computing device consuming less energy.