The Eclipse Foundation today announced the launch of the OpenADx Working Group, an automotive industry collaboration focused on creating better compatibility, interfaces, and broader interoperability for the autonomous driving software development stack. This working group establishes a much needed vendor-neutral home for industry-wide collaboration in order to speed innovation and productization. OpenADx will enable developers from OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers and tool providers to work together to create innovations that will benefit the entire industry. The working group launches with original members AVL, Bosch, Eteration, IBM, itemis, JC Information Management, Red Hat, and Siemens.
“From architecture definition through simulation and test, there is an immediate need for collaboration within the autonomous driving community,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director at the Eclipse Foundation. “The OpenADx working group seeks broad participation from developers throughout the autonomous driving ecosystem to create a common middleware stack for development that mirrors the successful standardization of common interfaces present within the robotics industry. By doing so, we will be able to speed development of solutions for every layer of the autonomous driving industry.”
The global autonomous vehicle market is expected to reach $557B by 2026 (source: Allied Market Research), creating an explosion of frameworks, simulation models, and tooling for OEMs and developers to choose from as they develop their applications. The heterogeneity of these tools, as well as the lack of common interfaces and standard reference models has become a major obstacle for OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers and tool providers who seek to quickly and easily ship new solutions, rather than spend time solving many one-off integration roadblocks. The OpenADx working group seeks to reduce and streamline this heterogeneity by creating a common framework of interfaces and standards for the entire industry.
OpenADx’s pilot project – Eclipse Cloe (Closed Loop Simulation Environment for Automated Driving) – will focus on defining a standard for interoperability between various simulation tools and the software in development with support for multiple autonomous driving software architectures.
In addition to creating standard approaches to common closed loop simulation scenarios, the OpenADx Working Group is seeking industry participation to fill other voids in autonomous driving development, including:
- Labeling — creating industry standard object classes and subclasses for lane curvature and lane markings.
- Software in the Loop (SiL) — standardizing a SiL testing approach for verification and validation.
- Open Source Hardware — certifying reference architectures for hardware/software combinations, particularly on SystemC/TLM.
- Co-Simulation — defining uniform data formats for simulation standards (like FMI, DCP, OSI, OpenScenario)
“We firmly believe that industry collaboration in the form of an Eclipse working group and open source projects will accelerate the development of autonomous driving,” said Andreas Riexinger, product management, Automated Driving at Bosch, “We are eager to play an active role in this vendor-neutral open source collaboration.”
“Siemens Digital Industries Software is proud to serve as a founding member of the OpenADx, as we are convinced that the introduction of autonomous driving vehicles will drastically impact the automotive industry as we know it today,” said Robin Van der Made, product manager at Siemens. “The revolution towards Connected, Autonomous, Shared and Electric mobility will change the buyer’s requirements and with that the vehicle development processes. To ensure safety and reliability for autonomous vehicles, a model-based engineering process is critical to our industry’s success. We believe standardization initiatives like OpenADx will prove to be instrumental in this big transition.”
“There are endless solutions based on customers‘ wants, but JCIM provides systems based on customers‘ needs,” said Christoph Hoffmann, CEO of JCIM. “With OpenADx we can develop solutions that are built upon standardized processes to solve technical problems humanly. Together we will make the impossible possible.”
“This is a strategic next step for Eteration to improve and extend not only our own OpenCanvas open software platform but to speed innovation throughout the entire industry,” said Eteration’s founder and chief scientist Naci Dai. “By building stronger relationships with other partners, we will help to enable the industry to deploy self-driving vehicles at scale.”
In addition to the OpenADx Working Group, the Eclipse Foundation supports openMobility, an organization that provides traffic simulation and modelling in urban areas around autonomous, openPASS, an organization that provides modules for simulating driver assistance and automated driving systems, and openMDM, which offers frameworks for standardized management of measured data. These automotive mobility ecosystem initiatives are designed to make transportation safer for everyone and accelerate innovation through collaboration.
To learn more about getting involved with OpenADx, view the group’s Charter and Working Group Participation Agreement (WPGA), visit http://openadx.eclipse.org, or email us at automotive@eclipse.org. You can also join the OpenADx mailing list.
About Eclipse Foundation
The Eclipse Foundation provides our global community of individuals and organizations with a mature, scalable and commercially-focused environment for open source software collaboration and innovation. The Foundation is home to the Eclipse IDE, Jakarta EE, and over 370 open source projects, including runtimes, tools, and frameworks for a wide range of technology domains such as IoT, automotive, geospatial, systems engineering and many others. The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit organization supported by over 275 members, including industry leaders who value open source as a key enabler for business strategy.