The Eclipse Software’s Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) Working Group Adds Seven New Projects

Europe’s leading open source foundation continues its momentum adding multiple new members as well as seven new projects for building an ecosystem for the software-defined vehicle

The Eclipse Foundation, one of the world’s largest open source foundations, announced major momentum with seven new projects initiated with the Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) Working Group, as well as a growing member base focused on innovation for the software-defined vehicle ecosystem. In just a few months, the SDV Working Group has expanded its membership by more than 30% to 19 members, including new members Volkswagen Group’s software unit CARIAD, Eteration, FutureWei, NXP, and Toyota.

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Using a “code first” approach, the SDV-related projects are focused on building the industry’s first open source software stacks and associated tooling for the core functionality of a new class of automobile. The SDV Working Group believes this approach will result in much faster material impact on the industry. These new projects, headed up by leaders such as Bosch, Microsoft, Continental, ZF, Cariad, Accenture, and Eteration, are already making their software available to any organization that wishes to leverage them for their own vehicle development.

“I’m thrilled with the industry response to our Software Defined Vehicle Working Group,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “In just a few short months, we’ve had seven projects contributed, which will collaboratively develop real code for all aspects of the automotive software ecosystem. We expect this momentum will only increase in the coming months.”

To support this transformation to software-defined vehicles, major players from the broader technology industry, as well as the automotive industry, are actively developing an open source in-vehicle application runtime stack, cloud-based vehicle operations, as well as highly integrated development toolchains. The open source Software Defined Vehicle initiative aims to deliver usable open source code for in-vehicle software across vehicle models, product lines, brands, organizations, and time. Doing so enables an order of magnitude increase in the speed of innovation, speed of production, and the ability to scale the production of software-centric vehicles. What’s more, this approach will significantly reduce the complexity of designing new vehicles, while also increasing efficiency. The ultimate goal is that industry players will benefit by being able to focus on innovation, while saving time and cost on the non-differentiating elements, like real-time operating systems, specific parts of the middleware layers or communication protocols.

Some of the new Software Defined Vehicle-related projects include:

Eclipse Velocitas
Eclipse Velocitas provides an end-to-end, scalable, modular, and open source development toolchain for creating containerized and non-containerized in-vehicle applications.

Eclipse Muto
Eclipse Muto provides an adaptive framework and a runtime platform for dynamically composable model-driven ROS software stacks on autonomous vehicles and robots in general. Eclipse Muto makes it easier to build an adaptive software stack that is able to update the system without compromising its mission, plan, safety, and security while it is active. Eclipse Muto can be used to introspect, monitor, and manipulate the actively running ROS graph (the network of ROS nodes) with a lightweight model and digital twin.

Eclipse eCAL (enhanced Communication Abstraction Layer)
The Eclipse eCAL (enhanced Communication Abstraction Layer) provides a middleware solution that enables scalable, high-performance inter-process communication on a single computer node or between different nodes in a computer network. Eclipse eCAL supports a wide range of hardware targets, operating systems, and programming languages.

Eclipse eCAL is shipped with sophisticated tools for live data monitoring, orchestrated message recording, and replay. It’s designed for rapid prototyping in the field of autonomous driving and has already proven its performance over the past few years in research projects of Continental as well as in other open source community projects.

Eclipse Leda
One of the main challenges in building open software for the SDV will be the combination of the diverse components into a coherent and useful whole; all the software components in the world will not have the impact needed to transform the automotive industry unless we can make them play together coherently and form a functional portfolio.

As a first step towards that goal, Eclipse Leda provides an “SDV distribution” that pulls together individual contributor pieces from the SDV WG and the larger OSS community to deliver a functional and always-available Linux-based image/distribution.

Eclipse Chariott
The Eclipse Chariott project aims to simplify and enhance in-vehicle software developer productivity by providing a metadata-driven middleware/abstraction layer that allows modern application programming models to target in-vehicle functions through a digital representation of vehicle state and capabilities and provides an extensible and dynamic architecture to access the vehicle hardware and sensors.

Eclipse ADAAA (Adaptive Cruise Control Demo Application for Adaptive AUTOSAR)
ADAAA is an example application for Adaptive AUTOSAR with the following goals:
1)   Provide a tutorial with simple example code bases for getting involved with the Adaptive AUTOSAR methodology and each functional cluster
2)   Use the Adaptive Cruise Control function to demonstrate the use of Adaptive AUTOSAR
3)   Build Adaptive AUTOSAR expertise across the community
4)   Use the community support to adapt to different Adaptive AUTOSAR provider

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Eclipse SommR
Eclipse SommR provides an automotive-grade implementation of the someIP specification for embedded Linux systems together with the required tools to support developers.

The Eclipse Foundation has decades of experience managing the governance of complex technology initiatives and multi-vendor organizations, making it the ideal organization to help manage such an endeavor. Its commitment to transparency, vendor-neutrality, and a shared voice will ensure that all participants have the opportunity to shape the future of the working group.

Quotes from Members

Bosch
“We are excited to see the first projects contributed to the SDV working group as this is a big milestone and underlines the ‘code first’ approach,” said Sven Kappel, VP and Head of Project Software Defined Vehicle, Bosch. “Additionally, we are also proud that we, as Bosch, are contributing two projects: Eclipse Velocitas and Eclipse Leda. We are looking forward to developing the projects together with the community.”

CARIAD
“As one of the leading software companies in the automotive industry, we are looking forward to the open cooperation in the Eclipse Foundation,” said Michael Wintergerst, executive vice president for Vehicle and Cloud Platform, CARIAD. “Open source has long been a central component in the automotive sector. We see great potential in the cooperation of the open source community for the software-driven car and also for our developers. We want to create innovations and set open standards together.”

Continental Automotive
“We are glad to support the ‘code first’ approach of Eclipse SDV by contributing Eclipse eCAL: a scalable middleware enabling efficient communication within distributed systems,” said Michael Huelsewies, Head of Architecture and Software at Continental Automotive. “Continental is looking forward to collaborating within the community to create innovative solutions for the Software-Defined Vehicle.”

ETAS
“The first Eclipse SDV Contribution Day sets a major milestone on the road to an open-source software-defined vehicle ecosystem: first, we look forward to listening to the community’s projects and are excited to present our two projects. Second, we welcome the growth of the community and the addition of new participants building an ecosystem for the software-defined vehicle,” said Christoph Hartung, Chairman of the Board of Management of ETAS GmbH. “We are convinced that cross-company collaboration will lead to excellent results.”

Eteration
“Industry practices for automotive software often embrace proprietary and closed solutions, where many common building blocks are replicated. The Eclipse Software Defined Vehicle Working Group is a platform for open technology and collaboration that can impact how we build software for vehicles,” said Naci Dai, founder, Composiv.ai and Eteration. “Eteration is contributing Eclipse Muto a high-performance runtime for model based contextual adaptivity in ROS software stacks. Eclipse Muto makes it possible to deploy extensible, dynamic, and adaptive behavior to edge devices.”

Microsoft
“The Software Defined Vehicle Working Group provides a vendor-neutral place for software engineers to jointly solve non-differentiating challenges of automotive software development,” said Ulrich Homann, corporate vice president and Distinguished Architect, Cloud + AI, Microsoft. “Microsoft is contributing the middleware ‘Eclipse Chariott’ to target in-vehicle functions through a digital representation of vehicle state and capabilities. The dynamic architecture enhances developer productivity, freeing resources to focus on delivering new services that address latest customer needs.”

ZF
“We are pleased to welcome the participants of the first Contribution Day in Friedrichshafen and fully support the open source approach of the new Software Defined Vehicle Working Group of the Eclipse Foundation,” says Dr. Dirk Walliser, senior vice president Corporate R&D of the ZF Group. “The first projects presented and the growing number of members show that we are on the right track to improve the quality of automotive software through open source development. We see all vehicles as software-defined, think ‘software-first’ and act in a networked way.”

The Eclipse Foundation provides a global community of individuals and organizations with a mature, scalable, and business-friendly environment for open source software collaboration and innovation. The Foundation is home to the Eclipse IDE, Jakarta EE, and over 400 open source projects, including runtimes, tools, and frameworks for cloud and edge applications, IoT, AI, automotive, systems engineering, distributed ledger technologies, open processor designs, and many others.

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