CIE Components in Electronics
Green Hills Software in collaboration with Apex.AI has announced the availability of their production-ready ROS 2-compatible development framework for safety and security-critical transportation solutions. This highly optimized solution is a software platform that combines the safety and security of the INTEGRITY RTOS with Apex.AI’s Apex.OS, a fork of ROS 2, made real-time, reliable, deterministic, and certified for safety-critical applications. The combined solution gives OEMs and Tier 1s a faster and lower cost path to production for their ROS / ROS 2 prototypes in vehicle domains such as ADAS and autonomous driving that require the highest levels of automotive safety, including up to ISO 26262 ASIL D.
Developers of safety-critical transportation systems face a gap for successfully migrating the prototypes they developed with ROS / ROS 2 to a production-focused real-time and safety-certified computing platform and into production. Moving from high-powered engineering mule test vehicles to production vehicles is challenging. The computing platforms of production vehicles are composed of a complex mix of heterogeneous multicore processors, limited memory, mixed-criticality services, and multiple asynchronous communication networks. Moreover, production vehicles require high reliability, real-time determinism, safety and security as defined by the ISO 26262 automotive safety standard and ISO 21434 automotive cybersecurity standard. The products and expertise from Green Hills Software and Apex.AI provide this purpose-built path to production.
“We love that Green Hills shares our vision for how developers can speed prototypes into production for automotive domains including ADAS and autonomous driving. What we’re doing together is part of the recipe for realising the next generation of software-defined vehicles,” said Joe Speed, Apex.AI VP of product & chief evangelist.
“The combination of the Green Hills production-proven, safe and secure INTEGRITY RTOS with its advanced ROS-aware development tools and industry-leading C/C++ compilers provide the necessary foundation to the production-focused Apex.AI ROS 2 safety framework and middleware for today’s automated drive systems,” said Dan Mender, VP of business development, Green Hills Software. “Our collaboration with the Apex.AI team provides OEMs and their partners a highly optimized ROS 2-based foundational software development platform allowing OEMs to focus on unique software-defined vehicle application differentiations.”
The INTEGRITY RTOS separation kernel is pre-certified to ISO 26262 ASIL D and has adopted the automotive cybersecurity standard ISO 21434. It provides the safe, secure, and deterministic run-time foundation to run, separate, and protect complex software that performs critical functions, such as the Apex.OS and Apex.Middleware, from less critical aspects of the platform. INTEGRITY securely separates critical and non-critical software components and guarantees that system-critical applications receive the necessary hardware and software resources, even when faced with malicious or unintended events. In addition, the advanced ROS-aware MULTI integrated development environment (IDE) helps developers find and fix the most difficult software bugs faster, reducing development time and cost while raising code quality. The MULTI IDE, with its ISO 26262 ASIL D safety-qualified compilers and safety-certified C/C++ run time libraries, provides developers with the proper tools for creating system critical application code that requires safety certification.
Apex.OS is a real-time, functionally-safe ROS 2 distribution that abstracts the complexity of underlying hardware, middleware, kernel, interfaces, and drivers into simple to use, robust, reliable, and safe APIs. Apex.OS Cert is TÜV Nord certified for ISO 26262 ASIL D. Apex.Middleware provides the discovery and communication between applications with zero-copy and a small, fixed latency and CPU budget cost regardless of data size or type.
