November 17
29
s
afety
& s
eCurIty
Data Distribution Service
in autonomous car design
By Stan Schneider,
CEO Real-Time Innovations
Builders of autonomous vehicles
face a daunting challenge.
To get a competitive edge, intelligent
vehicle manufacturers must deliver
superior driving experience while
meeting demanding requirements in
distributed systems design for safety,
resilience, security, scalability, fault
tolerance, and fast data processing.
n
An autonomous car is a highly distributed
dynamic system of extreme complexity, where
component objects continuously make real-
time local decisions based on system-wide
constraints and approximate global state. With
respect to autonomous car design, RTI explains
the relevance of the most widely adopted, open,
industry-leading standard for real-time and
embedded systems: Data Distribution Service
(DDS). DDS provides a proven foundation for
highly resilient and responsive distributed con-
trol systems. Its real-time performance, high
reliability, open architecture, and publish/sub-
scribe decoupling greatly accelerate and sim-
plify distributed system development, making
it highly applicable for autonomous cars. DDS
is the only technology that can deliver micro-
second latency, IEC 26262 safety certification,
top security, and operational proof in bil-
lion-dollar product lines.
Smart machines (such as autonomous cars)
are changing the world and driving the cur-
rent phase in the evolution of the Industrial
Internet of Things (IIoT). Indeed, the Indus-
trial Internet is where some of the most excit-
ing innovations are developing – innovations
that are reshaping infrastructure for indus-
tries from medicine to power generation. The
IIoT relies on new networking standards such
as DDS for real-time applications in medicine,
energy, transportation, and remote monitor-
ing and control (SCADA). DDS middleware
provides reliable, physics-speed connections
between smart devices and subsystems that
make up hospital networks, power grids,
fleets of unmanned military vehicles, and now
autonomous cars.
One of the important benefits of DDS is that
it allows developers to design high-level pub-
lish-and-subscribe application programming
interfaces instead of writing low-level net-
working code. By eliminating potentially tens
of thousands of lines of custom application
code and its certification evidence, Connext
DDS Cert helps developers save millions of
dollars in cost while reducing risk and accel-
erating time-to-market. With DDS, modules
communicate by simply publishing the data
and commands they produce and subscrib-
ing to the data they need. Connext DDS han-
dles all of the communication details. These
include discovery and presence detection,
routing, reliability, failover, serialization, and
state synchronization for late joiners. For
time-critical applications, it provides real-
time quality of service control and visibility.
While implementation details for autonomous
cars are still tightly guarded design secrets,
deployment examples in adjacent markets
provide a wealth of information about DDS
and its ability to solve the most challenging
connectivity problems. The following use
cases have one or more connectivity require-
ments in common with autonomous cars. In
the case of autonomous cars, requirements
span three main areas: performance, safety,
and integration. Systems must ensure perfor-
mance to successfully connect components,
optimize safety at every level of a fully auton-
omous system, and make it easier to integrate
complex, reliable software from diverse com-
ponents.
Familiar names such as Audi and Volkswagen
are among the carmakers that have already
introduced RTI Connext DDS to enable
high-performance connectivity for testing
and enhancing smart cars today. Audi was able
to replace a proprietary fiber network and test
rig with a DDS data-bus, giving the company
a flexible way to connect multiple simulation
vendor systems. RTI middleware enables a
modular test environment with the speed to
handle data coming from all of the electronic
systems in a vehicle during simulated opera-
tion. The autonomous vehicle algorithms are
part of the Volkswagen effort in driver assis-
tance and integrated safety. The system com-
bines radars, laser range finders, and video to
assist safe operation. VW uses RTI Connext
DDS to help drivers avoid obstacles, detect
lane departures, track eye activity, and safely
negotiate turns. The DDS protocol connects
(source: Getty images / iStock /
alex-mit; 25537824)
