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In this short paper, we explain how e-mobility and the drive towards autonomous driving and MaaS is being disruptive for the traditional automotive vehicle makers. We show how’s KURT’s Software Driven approach meets the challenges.

VirtuosoNext for emobility

Date:   9^th October 2017

Press Release:

Altreonic NV, provider of the unique fault tolerant VirtuosoNext RTOS environment, and

LikeAbird S.L.U., provider of the INAV-IG, the industrial grade Autopilot/Flight Control System Ecosystem for unmanned systems and drones

join forces in combining both technologies in an integrated platform.

LikeAbird is a R&D Think Tank company providing innovative systems, products and solutions in the field of the unmanned (air/land/sea) and robotic industry.

Date and place: 17th October 2017, Mechelen, Belgium

Title: Autonomous systems: surviving the nanosecond blue screen

by Eric Verhulst, CEO/CTO - Altreonic

Abstract: Smart systems are a hot topic these days. Enabled by continuously shrinking electronics, we can now add software to almost anything, from thermostats to autonomously driving cars and self-regulating energy networks. But is a smart system also trustworthy? Will it ever be smart enough to be trustworthy? Self driving cars for example use artificial intelligence to mimic the behaviour of an experienced driver. Clearly, this is a hypothetical driver as human drivers make mistakes all the time. And how would you feel when your car updates its driving software while driving? How smart is a self-driving software that keeps on speeding after it detected six times in a row that the driver was not paying attention to its warnings? How smart is it to have a dishwasher talk to the internet so that it doesn't work when you have no connection? Of course, this type of smartness was introduced by smart people. The issue is complexity, made worse by legacy developed at a time when trustworthiness was a second thought. In the real world the complexity is immense and the law of Murphy is king. The question is how can we make things simultaneously smart and trustworthy? Another question is whether such a smart system should mimic a human brain? Trustworthy means predictable, safe and secure; all aspects for which humans have a very bad reputation. The road to salvation is a systematic one whereby unavoidable errors and faults are taking into account at every step of the development. Fault tolerance and resilience are key.

Full program here.

Download the presentation in attachment.

How do companies tackle technological challenges?

During this Seminar Day, engineers, researchers and R&D managers from the manufacturing industry will come together to learn more about the results of some of our recent projects. 

More specifically, Altreonic will show how POF reliability prediction and analysis at system level is applied by Altreonic for developing the KURT e-mobility vehicle. The process covers from selection of components and sub-system modules as well as the software architecture.

Date:  28/09/2017 - De Montil, Moortelstraat 8, 1790 Affligem

Registration here

Altreonic has now ported the latest VirtuosoNext Designer to ARM Cortex M-series microcontrollers. The latest version fully exploits the Memory Protection support to provide fine-grain partitioning and allows fine-grain recovery from processor exceptions in a few microseconds at the Task level. This effectively provides fault tolerance for the applications without the system experiencing any significant delay and without having to apply costly hardware redundancy schemes. At the system level, the resilience level is greatly increased at virtually no cost. The economic advantages are significant.

Now that we have support for fault recovery in VirtuosoNext, we have been wondering how extensive the coverage could be in real-life systems. The issue is that data on failure root causes is either considered as confidential, either narrowly focusing on specific elements (e.g. hardware reliability). We cannot really find statistical data for these system level failures. Do you know of any such data?

PRESS RELEASE

Pressemitteilung • Communiqué de Presse • Comunicato Stampa

Altreonic successfully delivers on the EuroCPS NoFist project 

(Novel Fine Grain Space and Time Partitioning for a Mixed Criticality Platform)

In the project, supervised by Thales TRT, Altreonic ported and further developed VirtuosoNext Designer, providing as an industry’s first fine-grain space and time portioning. The latter enables non-stop hard real-time processing by recovering from runtime faults in microseconds on the selected Freescale T2080 platform.

A fault-tolerant, fully distributed RTOS

Just when you thought there was nothing new anymore in the world of RTOS, the VirtuosoNext RTOS announces seamless fault-tolerance, a milestone for embedded safety and security.

Synopsis: As the world is moving towards "smarter" systems, often embedded, and our life and society is becoming dependent on their uninterrupted operation, fault-tolerance is becoming a prime requirement. Just think about autonomous driving. Will it safely bring you home all the time? In case of a system fault, the reaction time is less than 100 milliseconds. No time for a reboot.

A consequence of the fine-grain space partitioning support in VirtuosoNext is the capability to recover from runtime faults within a few microseconds. The combination of fine-grain concurrency and this fast recovery effectively provides support for non-stop hard real-time processing even when faults occur without a complex and costly system design. VirtuosoNext non-stop capability means that fault-tolerance comes in reach in a cost-efficient manner, as well as in terms of development effort as in terms of compute resources. 

Altreonic has released an updated version of its "QoS and real-time requirements for embedded many- and multicore systems" booklet. A major chapter was added covering the fine-grain partitioning support of VirtuosoNext on several target processors (Texas Instruments M3, A9, C6678 and Freescale 2080). The paper clearly shows that partitioning support for safety and security can be implemented with almost no penalties for the real-time behaviour. In addition, the code size remains very modest (ranging from less than 10 kbytes to 38 kbytes depending on the target). Download the attached publication for more details.

Leslie Lamport, the man behind TLA+/TLC, the formal modeling language we used to develop our RTOS kernel has started a series of video lectures on TLA+. If interested in a comprehensive and pragmatic approach to formal modelling, we can only recommend it.

The webpage with a discussion forum is here with the videos here.