Wind River collaborates with Baidu on Autonomous Driving Platform

Wind River, a leader in delivering software for the intelligent edge, announced its collaboration with Baidu to develop an autonomous vehicle solution.

A joint proof of concept has been developed to include an AUTOSAR Adaptive-based software architecture with Baidu's Apollo autonomous driving open platform, designed to meet the specific challenges of the next generation of software-defined automobiles.

Baidu is the world's largest Chinese language Internet search engine, an integrated Internet information service company, and a world-leading artificial intelligence (AI) platform company. Baidu's Apollo programme aims to provide an open, reliable, and secure software platform for its ecosystem partners to develop their own autonomous driving systems.

“The complex and varied challenges that come with autonomous driving, coupled with vastly different perspectives across carmakers, make for a difficult road to mass production. A strong push toward standards can help advance the entire industry,” said Brenda Herold, Vice President of Market Segment Teams at Wind River. “We look forward to working with innovators such as Baidu in an effort to speed the development, testing, and deployment of autonomous vehicles across the industry.”

“Standards are needed in order for the industry to make significant steps forward. A secure and reliable open platform can assist companies in more rapidly creating autonomous systems as well as helping technologies across the ecosystem be more interoperable,” said Jingao Wang, Head of Apollo Platform and Executive Director at Baidu. “We're excited to work with a software leader like Wind River to address many of the challenging needs of an autonomous vehicle system.”

The proof of concept highlights the Baidu Apollo autonomous framework and Wind River AUTOSAR Adaptive-based software architecture, supporting heterogeneous systems with mixed criticality of safety requirements. Open source software, such as non-safety critical applications (infotainment, for example), can run on Wind River Linux, while a proven commercial RTOS such as VxWorks can support safety-critical applications that require deterministic performance. Using a software architecture that can successfully house both safety-critical and non-safety-critical applications on the same piece of hardware, carmakers can achieve significant savings on bill of materials (BOM) costs and power consumption in the vehicle.

Able to support customers' diverse range of computing needs, Wind River can create computing environments that accommodate multiple Linux-based workloads that are designed to function seamlessly with the hard real-time, deterministic VxWorks RTOS, giving customers the ability to cost effectively combine open source with the safety and reliability of time-tested certified computing software.