Real-Time Innovations (RTI), the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) connectivity company, has unveiled Connext Drive – a solution that aims to provide automotive manufacturers with the software and tools they need to build highly autonomous vehicles and fleets.
The solution includes a native Software Development Kit (SDK) for developing and integrating vehicle applications. It supports software from the research phase to production as it is built on the open Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard which is specified by all the important automotive ecosystems, including ROS2, AUTOSAR, and several commercial designs. This lets Connext Drive be the first – and only – platform that can integrate DDS, ROS2, AUTOSAR Classic, and AUTOSAR Adaptive, letting OEMs work with the standard (or standards) that best meets their needs at different points in the innovation cycle.
According to the company, Connext Drive addresses many challenges, including:
• Vehicles increasingly demand security. Connext Drive directly enforces data integrity through the underlying protocol. It authenticates participants to ensure that applications talk only to trusted remote applications. It encrypts flows to protect the privacy of data. Uniquely, Connext Drive offers flexibility, allowing designers to optimize performance and security by choosing which parts of the system, and even which individual dataflows, must be protected.
• Distributed systems evolve, and as they do often need to incorporate many components that change over time. As they change, component interfaces and data structures evolve and differ. Connext Drive can match these slightly-different data structures. This allows systems to add new capabilities over time. Thus, autonomous vehicle systems in development will maintain relevancy as the market advances over the next decade.
• Vehicles must operate non-stop. Even a short “downtime” threatens safety and reliability. To address this, Connext Drive supports full redundancy. Any sensor, data source, algorithm, compute platform or even network can be easily duplicated to provide higher reliability. The data-centric design allows the system to resolve this redundancy naturally.
• Future updates to Connext Drive will include reference architectures and data models, development and integration guides and optional ISO 26262 ASIL D safety-certified libraries. These will reduce the risk of deploying autonomous vehicles in safety-critical applications.
• Finally, autonomous systems are challenging to develop. Connext Drive offers unique tools and services, including the ability to collect data to control the vehicle remotely, record data for debugging and simulation, build larger systems including V2X and easily troubleshoot technical issues.
RTI recognizes that the QNX Real-time Operating System (RTOS) is an important component for many of our customers who need a highly-reliable safety platform. Together, QNX’s POSIX compliant OS and RTI’s connectivity framework are a complete ‘integration friendly’ stack that can simplify and accelerate software development; and support the level of IP reuse required to be competitive in tomorrow’s connected and autonomous industries. The release of Connext Drive will bundle support for Linux and QNX on ARM platforms, making it easier for automotive customers to use the platforms that are most important to them.
Connext Drive thus offers automakers the software they need to operate in diverse real-time environments, interoperate with other systems within the vehicle, connect to off-vehicle systems, evolve systems over time, develop reliable and high-performance systems and build in top security.
Source: Press Release
