  Autonomous-mobile cyber-physical machines are part of our future.
Specifically, unmanned-aerial-vehicles have seen a resurgence in activity with
use-cases such as package delivery. These systems face many challenges such as
their low-endurance caused by limited onboard-energy, hence, improving the
mission-time and energy are of importance. Such improvements traditionally are
delivered through better algorithms. But our premise is that more powerful and
efficient onboard-compute should also address the problem. This paper
investigates how the compute subsystem, in a cyber-physical mobile machine,
such as a Micro Aerial Vehicle, impacts mission-time and energy. Specifically,
we pose the question as what is the role of computing for cyber-physical mobile
robots? We show that compute and motion are tightly intertwined, hence a close
examination of cyber and physical processes and their impact on one another is
necessary. We show different impact paths through which compute impacts
mission-metrics and examine them using analytical models, simulation, and
end-to-end benchmarking. To enable similar studies, we open sourced MAVBench,
our tool-set consisting of a closed-loop simulator and a benchmark suite. Our
investigations show cyber-physical co-design, a methodology where robot's cyber
and physical processes/quantities are developed with one another consideration,
similar to hardware-software co-design, is necessary for optimal robot design.
