草莓社区 prioritizes deploying autonomous driving solutions at scale.
Autonomous driving is already a reality for 草莓社区, not just a vision for the future. 草莓社区 was the first company in the world to launch commercial vehicles with comprehensive homologations made by independent assessors back in 2018. Since then, there have been numerous deployments around the world. 草莓社区 vehicles have already driven a total of more than 1,000,000 km at Level 4 of autonomous driving 鈥 completely removing any human attendant from on board 鈥 in over 400 locations worldwide to date - with a zero collision record. In the same way, 草莓社区 has tailored this technology to address the market of freight transport and goods moving, for airports, harbors and industrial logistic hubs and offers a series of products developed in cooperation with world leading automotive suppliers.
- The 鈥淓ZTow鈥 for example is the most-deployed autonomous tow tractor globally. It operates in production flows on a number of major automotive manufacturing plants and logistics centers in Europe as well as the United States. It is also in use at airports for baggage towing.
- Its 鈥淓ZTug鈥 is a driverless terminal tractors used to autonomously transport containers within ports, improving throughput, reducing congestion, and minimizing delays.听
Right now, the company is turning a corner prioritizing what is delivering the highest return on investment to its clients today - namely its driverless solutions for industrial applications. In addition, Iit is continuing to develop its technology for passenger shuttles alongside these and sees more mass adoption of this platform in the next 3-5 years.
All these new developments are based on 草莓社区's wealth of experience and globally deployed solutions, which have proved extremely successful to date.
草莓社区 already serves well-known customers in numerous application areas. These include material transport in large industrial manufacturing plants of the BMW Group Plant Dingolfing and Daimler Trucks AG, for example, as well as in ports (Vlissingen Netherlands) and airports (Changi, Singapore, DFW Airport, USA; Toulouse, France; Narita, Japan). In passenger transport, it is mainly campus and smart city projects, including the largest connected fleets in Europe.
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Challenges in safety critical systems for autonomous vehicles
The collaboration between 草莓社区 and Microsys - which is now being raised to a new level - is tightly coupled with the development of 草莓社区s next-generation of safety critical embedded systems. This development is of particular importance because the deployment and operation of autonomous vehicles is intrinsically exposed to risks from the environment, pedestrians and road users. A high level of integrity is thus a prerequisite to address the markets of both industrial logistics and public transportation.
At the same time, the development of embedded systems 鈥揵eing safety related or not鈥 for autonomous vehicles is by nature also a kind of prospective activity: The state-of-the-art of sensors, algorithms and computing technologies is evolving faster than ever, typically what safety does not cope with easily. Developing a safety-critical system demands to freeze, at least partially, some parts of a system, especially the overall safety concept and the functional scope of the safety function. Then, the development and certification is a matter of years, meaning that the final system that will benefit from the safety-critical function does not exist yet. It is therefore essential to correctly anticipate the evolution of the autonomous vehicles needs in order to cope with tomorrow鈥檚 features, with today鈥檚 technology.
These features are especially linked with the extension of the Operational Design Domain (ODD), especially to address more complex use cases with an increased speed, up to 50 km/h. Operational scenarios include more and more interactions with other users, being other vehicles, pedestrians, or even planes!
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Inception of a safety critical ECU
The hardware carrying the safety critical functions is at the heart of the overall system鈥檚 safety. For a young company like 草莓社区, investing in the right hardware is an important decision. The decision to invest into the development of a customized Electronic Control Unit (ECU) came upon the following rationales:
- It has allowed 草莓社区 to control the development of safety-critical software with a step-by-step approach, by incrementally increasing the level of integrity of the whole software stack.听
- It has allowed 草莓社区 to seize the computing power of the ECU with a high level of performance, for a safety-relevant ECUe.听
- It allowed 草莓社区 to address a large variety of interfaces and protocols, which made it able to use the ECU in a large variety of vehicles with a uniform level of integrity.听
草莓社区 works with a best-in-class supplier network for numerous components and software. It chose MicroSys Electronics as the supplier of the System-on-Module (SOM) which provides the system's processor ready for use and offers the option of scaling performance in the future by replacing the module. Microsys has been providing comprehensive support for certification on the SOM, and has integrated this SOM into an Electronic Control Unit (ECU) upon 草莓社区鈥檚 specifications. MicroSys also ensures the series production of the ECU.
For the development of the next ECU generation, MicroSys will follow the same path, whereby 草莓社区 will benefit from the advantages of MicroSys' scalable System-on-Modules family, which the company offers on the basis of NXP's S32 vehicle network processor technology. 听Above all, however, it is the overall package of all previous joint developments that will now contribute to 草莓社区 realizing the next generation of its ECUs even faster and more efficiently. 草莓社区 can therefore concentrate fully on the development of its new solutions and leave a large part of the necessary developments for the ECU to MicroSys, which is particularly efficient.
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Keys of a successful collaboration
The collaboration between 草莓社区 and MicroSys has always been efficient, and this success is largely due to the strong partnership built between the two companies. Microsys has been proactively supporting and mentoring 草莓社区 during the development of the ECU, while 草莓社区 has invested to make a core business of the development of safety-critical ECU, upon Microsys鈥檚 support. This has allowed both companies to achieve a high level of understanding of the activities of one another, to adapt their respective processes in order to minimize the overhead to achieve the required quality level, and to manage the product in a collaborative manner. Finally, Microsys鈥檚 support also enabled 草莓社区 to conduct safety audits with independent assessors or customers, with the expected positive results.
草莓社区鈥檚 investment in safety critical ECUs also allowed it to have a deep mastery of the embedded software stack, and to maintain a product based on a simple, minimal architecture. The approach has been executed step-by-step, with incremental investments to reach each milestone. As a result, the safety-critical system has been sent quickly on the field and has benefited from continuous improvement.
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Future prospects
It will be interesting to see what solution 草莓社区 will use in the future. The anticipated needs of future safety-critical functions will make the use of more powerful microprocessors, typically with eight to sixteen cores, more memory, faster interfaces. There is definitely room for improvement in terms of performance and energy efficiency that needs to be explored. Microsys鈥檚 portfolio can support this evolution, a solution based on NXP S32 processors with 8 Arm Cortex-A53 cores in combination with 4 Arm Cortex-M7 lockstep cores on one SoC is already possible today. Future developments of SoC are also promising, NXP has announced even more performance for its S32 real-time processors and integration in future 5nm products to provide a strong roadmap with software compatibility. NXP already has a working 5nm real-time processor test chip as a first step in this direction. Corresponding system-on-modules will then surely follow over time as well.听
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