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By Mark Hermeling
This topic invariably comes up when talking to customers, unfortunately, there is not just one, but several primary use cases. There are multiple ways to look into the various use cases. The one I like best is to look at generic drivers. An alternative is to look at actual usages in the various industries.
By Paul Henderson
Here’s the final installment in my series about our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog postings). If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at paul.henderson@windriver.com and I will send it to you.
In this section of the survey we asked participants about what test tools they use today and where they are investing in test automation. Given the high cost of product failure, accelerating complexity and reduced schedules the industry is turning to more test automation in 2010 to help address these problems. The top investment are moving to new tools that can help test teams and their management better understand how well they are testing, better focus their efforts on the areas needing testing, and reduce cycle time through more automation.
By Paul Henderson
I’m continuing my series on our embedded device industry software testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog posting). If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at paul.henderson@windriver.com and I will send it to you.
By Paul Henderson
Here’s the next installment in my series on our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog postings). If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at paul.henderson@windriver.com and I will send it to you.
In this section of the survey we asked participants about how they measure software quality today, the metrics most often cited by survey respondents were reactive in nature such as tracking customer-reported failures and open defects rather than metrics that can help them prevent defects.
By Paul Henderson
Today I'm continuing my series on our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog posting). If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at paul.henderson@windriver.comand I will send it to you.
In part 2 of the survey we asked about schedule compression and what affect that was having on the device testing cycle. A majority of survey participants reported that market conditions have forced them to shorten their development schedules by as much as 18 months.
By Mark Hermeling
I have been back in Ottawa now for just over a week after my 5 week trip through Europe and am working through my notes from the past month. And what a month it has been, in an earlier post I jokingly declared 2010 the year of embedded virtualization and this is certainly ringing true.
An overview of the activities of last month will present a decent picture of the status of embedded virtualization and the interest.
By Mike Deliman
How timely! A couple of months ago the discussion started - "will unmanned vehicles make a transition into civilian use". I've been taking the stance that since we're talking vehicles - not just aircraft but all forms of non-stationary robot, that it is inevitable. Even with aircraft I believe it is inevitable, though it may take a little longer for unmanned / automated aircraft to be certified for use in civilian airspace.
It would make sense that robots would be deployed for things that are either impossible for humans to do, or for things that are hazardous and dangerous. On the impossible-for-humans side, quick return deep-dive missions in the ocean, and several-day long monitoring missions come to mind, as well as some interesting possibilities for telepresence tourism. The hazardous side is easy to imagine - everything from maintenance of city infrastructures to handing toxic or radioactive substances would be fair game to use robots for, as well as underground mining.
By Mike Deliman
This may sound a bit funny, but in the space industry, we're constantly playing catch-up. We're either looking at or for things that happened millions or hundreds of millions of years ago, sending rockets off to get to where something will have been just in time to take a picture of or bore a hole into it, or designing new rockets for flight 5 years from now with computer bits that would have been considered top-of-the-line 5 or 10 years ago. When we're recovering data and sending commands from and to deep space probes, we point our antennae to where the probe is supposed to be 30 minutes from now and start sending our data now; the idea is by the time the data actually gets there the craft will be where it was expected and receive the commands, and send it's data back to us.
This process I just described - of anticipating where a craft is, transmitting before it's there - and it transmitting back - is pretty much how the Deep Space network is currently used. It takes huge amounts of planning, all done in advance, to set up the multiple sessions that allow one successful exchange like that to work out. People consult tables of times when craft will be "visible", consult tables of one-way light distances to find transmission times. When they think they know when they need time, and how much data they expect to exchange (how much time they need), they contact the folks who run the big antennas. if the time slot is available, arrangements are made, and that one set of transmissions can take place. The folks who run the Deep Space Network and their customers do this sort of thing all the time - it's how they try to make the most efficient use of their giant antennae.
By Paul Parkinson
I blogged last year on Active Driver Assistance and noted my concerns about the potential for adaptive cruise control to make an incorrect decision and increase the risk of an accident rather than reduce it.
So I was interested to hear a BBC news report earlier this week about a device which automatically stops acceleration when a vehicle exceeds the speed limit going on test in London. Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA) is being developed by Transport for London (TfL) and uses a newly-introduced digital speed limit map of the city. On the Radio4 Today programme, journalist Quentin Wilson said that anything that takes away driver control has to be looked at carefully.
By Mike Deliman
When I was a kid anything that was a computer, or had one in it, was pretty obvious. Computers weren't "just everywhere". Now we've got multiple CPU chips on a board, multiple CPU cores on a chip, different kinds of cores on a single chip, multiple computer boards in a single chassis, ... it goes on. These things are embedded in everything around us, all this hardware glued together to achieve something. This brings us to software. Software has to evolve to keep up with hardware, and with the needs of users. With all these cores and chips and boards and systems running around, it gets a bit confusing. Software is what enables everything from multi-processing to "poly-processing". There's a lot of buzzwords about it - SMP, AMP, POS, VOS, Real time kernel, Separation Kernels... but what does it all mean? And... what's it for?
By Paul Parkinson
I recently received a brochure for the new Audi A4
which has its UK launch on 23rd February, so I guess Audi must think
it's time for me to trade in my A3, which had its 120,000 mile (190,000
km) service last week. Flicking through the brochure, I noticed a
number of new technologies being introduced on the new A4 model. The Audi Drive Select features comfort, auto and dynamic drive modes; Audi Side Assist uses radar sensors to detect vehicles in the car's blind spots; and Audi Lane Assist warns if the car strays from the marked lane. Back in the 1990's, I attended a lecture given by Jaguar about the PROMETHEUS research programme
(IEEE), which was investigating some of these technologies, as well as
others such as Head-Up Display systems (which are now being offered on
some executive cars).
By Paul Parkinson
I read last week that BMW has been researching the use of the Internet Protocol (IP) over standard Ethernet (Cisco) to network automotive controllers ('BMW brings Internet protocol under the hood', EETimes).
The motivation for the research is that at present, a number of different networking technologies (including CAN, LIN, MOST and FlexRay) are used in automotive applications, and these are optimized for different types of application, but the lack of standardization results in complexity and cost.
So, I was expecting the article to say that BMW had found Ethernet to be suitable for non-critical applications, but not well-suited to critical systems.
By Paul Parkinson
Yesterday, I attended the UK's Military Aerospace & Electronics technical conference and exhibition, which was held at the Heritage Motor Centre.
The technical conference was split into three technical tracks, which
were broadly related to avionics, land systems and technologies; and as
is sometimes the case at these conferences I found that I wanted to
attend some presentations which were running concurrently!
By Warren Kurisu
One of my favorite sponsorship activities is the Challenge X competition, brought to us by our partner National Instruments (NI).
Seventeen teams were challenged to re-engineer a GM Equinox, a crossover sport utility vehicle to minimize energy consumption, emissions, and greenhouse gases while maintaining or exceeding the vehicle's utility and performance. Year 1 focused on modeling, simulation, and testing of the vehicle power-train and vehicle subsystems selected by each school. Years 2 and 3 allowed the teams to actually integrate their re-designed components into a GM Equinox.
By Paul Parkinson
In an earlier blog, 'A robot in every home', I commented on some of the issues related to the development of robotics software, in particular in relation to open standards and safety-criticality. This was in the context of domestic and industrial robots. Now it seems that the issue which is causing debate in the scientific community is prospect of deployment of autonomous decision-making military robots ('Robot future poses hard questions', BBC News).
There have been significant advances in the development of robotic systems for military applications in recent years, the DARPA Grand Challenges in 2004 & 2005 having been successful in encouraging the advancement of autonomous systems for battlefield environments. Later this year, the DARPA Urban Challenge, as its name suggests, will present different technical challenges, as the autonomous vehicles will need to manoeuvre in mock city environment "executing simulated military supply missions while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections, and avoiding obstacles."
By Paul Parkinson
In my previous post on software safety standards, in response to some questions raised by Alex Wilson, I commented on what I believe are signs of convergence between avionics software standards. However, I didn't address Alex's question on whether there is any potential for convergence between avionics and automotive software standards.
Electronic systems have been present in automotive systems for many years now, but they have only really become visible to the driver and passengers with the advent of infotainment systems and driver-assist systems, such as Anti-Lock Braking System and airbag Supplementary Restraint Systems (wikipedia).
By Paul Parkinson
In a recent post on software certification, Alex Wilson asked why there are so many software safety certification standards? The current situation is of course due to historical reasons, and this has resulted in some interesting anomalies. However, I think there is some reason for cautious optimism, as there appears to be more increasingly widespread acceptance of standards in recent years, and there is also a degree of convergence between standards, at least in some cases.
The RTCA DO-178B standard was originally developed for the safety critical software on civil aircraft certified by the US FAA, but in recent years this has been increasingly adopted by US military aircraft programmes, and subsequently on civil programmes in other countries around the world. (In Europe, civil aircraft are actually developed according to the EUROCAE ED-12B standard, but this is identical to DO-178B).
By Doug Gaff
Following up on today’s announcement of milestones in three of the DSDP projects—eRCP 1.0, MTJ 0.7, and TM 1.0—I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on DSDP…how it started, where it is today, and where it’s heading. First, let me start with a timeline of project events.
March 2005. Unofficially, the DSDP project got its start at a BoF session during EclispeCon last year. At the BoF, several device software tools vendors assembled to discuss the need for more embedded-specific functionality in Eclipse, specifically in the debugging area. There was acknowledgment of CDT and its extensive contribution to tooling in the embedded space, but there was also a desire to see more enhancements in the Eclipse Platform and more of a breadth of functionality around device software development. Shortly after EclipseCon, Wind River proposed the DSDP project and its two initial sub-projects, Target Management and Device Debugging. The TM project set out to build a framework and UI for managing remote embedded devices. The DD project initially focused on working with the Eclipse Platform Debug team to create a more customizable debugging framework in the Platform.
By John Bruggeman
Thanks to everyone for the feedback on my last blog “Linux and Automotive: Reaching a Tipping Point.” I’m really interested in this topic and all of the response I got inspired me to dive in a little deeper.
Over the past several months, I’ve talked to a lot of people in the automotive industry. I asked them one simple question: Which OS will dominate automotive infotainment?
Here’s what I learned:
First, everyone seems to think the game will boil down to two big contenders: Linux and Windows. But because of some very basic business, technology, and user-experience factors, Linux will become the platform of choice.
By John Bruggeman
Linux has always been suspect when it comes to automotive applications.
The general belief was that safety-critical automotive applications required a deterministic, real-time operating system. Linux just didn’t cut it for telematics or under-the-hood applications. OEMs relied on proprietary OS companies for their solutions.
Now some of that belief is grounded in fact. Consequently, Linux adoption in automotive has moved at a snail’s pace.
But I believe moving forward, Linux adoption in the automotive industry will happen quickly, dramatically, and in ways we never expected.
By Peter Kleiner
Recently I was at a congress in Germany about advances in electronics of the car (the congress was in German and there is no English web page yet - see http://www.elektronik-tagung.de/mic/elekTagung2006/deutsch/ ). There was a really interesting session about consumer devices and their emerging into the car.
A standard mobile device that can be found in cars today is the mobile phone. Integration of this device into the navigation or infotainment system in the car is state of the art. There are standards around like Bluetooth which define the communication and data exchange between the mobile phone and the in-car device. By that, the in-car device can access the address book of the phone and can initiate or accept phone calls. Typically, the display of the mobile phone is not used in this scenario.
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