On Oct. 16, industrial internet of things (IIoT) connectivity company Real-Time Innovations (RTI) announced the newest release of its Connext product suite, Connext 6, which includes the first connectivity software designed to accelerate the development and deployment of highly autonomous systems.

With Connext 6, autonomous vehicle developers are provided with the advanced technology necessary to address the complex data distribution challenges of Level 4 and Level 5 autonomy.

Additionally, RTI says Connext 6 offers the only “standards-based framework” to support autonomous vehicle development, from research to production.

According to Bob Leigh, senior market development director of autonomous systems at RTI, the requirements for Connext 6 came from RTI’s work with customers that are developing autonomous vehicles. This work has seen a noticeable uptick over the last few years, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed by RTI.

“Three years ago we only had a handful of commercial customers developing autonomous vehicles, now we have more than 30 customers developing some type of autonomous vehicle across a number of industries,” Leigh tells AUVSI. Those industries include the commercial industry, the research industry, and the defense industry.

Key Features

Connext 6 is a suite of products built on prior versions of Connext DDS Secure, Connext DDS Professional, and Connext DDS Micro—all of which are based on the OMG DDS standard, Leigh explains.

Connext 6 has a number of key features, one of which is the new RTI FlatData representation, which “eliminates serialization/deserialization overhead, significantly reducing latency and CPU utilization for large and small data samples,” Leigh says.

This is important for sensor fusion applications that need to minimize latency between when an event occurs and when it is recognized by the sensor fusion, “locationalization” and path planning algorithms.

Leigh says any delay lowers the fidelity of the real-world model and makes the autonomous vehicles’ understanding of what is happening around it less accurate, and possibly dangerous.

“This feature is going to be very important to quickly assimilate lidar, radar and image data into the system,” Leigh notes.

RTI has also introduced “optimized shared memory transport” to nearly eliminate “end-to-end latency and overhead” in Connext DDS Professional, Connext DDS Secure and Connext DDS Micro.

This allows developers to use the same interfaces to communicate between applications running on the same CPU and across networks, while still maintaining the performance that they expect and need from software modules running on the same hardware.

RTI says this ultimately reduces development costs because developers would have to develop their own protocols without this feature. This feature also supports software portability, running software on a common CPU one day and distributing it to other processors in a second architecture the next, without having to redevelop the software.

“This can speed time to market and reduce software maintenance and engineering costs,” Leigh says.

Connext 6 also extends support for DDS Security plugins to Connext DDS Micro, RTI Persistence Service and several Connext utilities. With security being an important feature of the autonomous vehicle architecture, DDS Security in Connext 6 will allow RTI’s customers to get security that can run on highly-resource constrained microcontrollers and be safety certified for the first time.

Leigh says this is a “significant advantage” for connected and autonomous vehicles which have a much larger attach surface than the traditional car architecture, as DDS Security allows for “standardized, fine-grained security” that is well-suited to a mission and safety critical system that must be completely resilient to failure.

“We believe the inclusion of DDS Security in our Micro product, and the ability to safety certify security, will be a game changer for the industry,” Leigh says. “Traditionally there is no security within the car, and numerous significant vulnerabilities. Now, OEMs will have the tools to build practical and robust security solutions.”

Tackling challenges

RTI says Connext 6 allows makers of autonomous systems to address a number of key challenges, including: effective management of high-bandwidth sensor data; simple integration with standardized interfaces; and optimized security, ideal for safety-critical systems.

Highly autonomous systems face the unprecedented challenge of assimilating large volumes of streaming data from lidar, high-definition cameras and radar sensors, distributing it to many destinations and simultaneously analyzing and responding to it in real-time.

Usually to meet these requirements, autonomous vehicle developers would have to develop time-intensive, in-house data distribution technologies, but with Connext 6, developers can now efficiently distribute high bandwidth sensor data to autonomous system applications, including for sensing, perception, visualization, mapping and display.

RTI adds that Connext 6 offers new mechanisms that are optimized for sending and receiving large data samples, in an effort to support high-volume data. These enhancements “significantly enhance” throughput and latency, RTI says. The company says that with typical HD camera data, they reduce end-to-end latency by up to 67 percent when distributing data over an ethernet network and up to 99 percent when distributing data over shared memory, between two applications running on the same processor.

Connext 6 enhancements preserve traditional Connext DDS strengths, which include the ability to “evolve data models over time” while retaining interoperability with already deployed components, content-aware filtering and data introspection and DDS-compliant network interoperability.

With all of Connext 6’s capabilities, Leigh says RTI has “several important, industry-leading customers” that are waiting for this software and the new capabilities it provides. With this in mind, Leigh says it is the company’s priority to get the new technology into their hands and help them leverage all of the capabilities that Connext 6 has to offer to help them compete in this market.

Leigh adds that the company will also be sharing Connext 6 with the rest of its customer base and pursuing a strategic effort to educate them on how the new technology and services can help them develop next-generation autonomous systems.

For the rest of the market, Leigh says that the company will be executing an awareness campaign promoting Connext 6 at several upcoming strategic events including IoTSWC in Barcelona, the AUTOSAR Open Conference in Shanghai and Embedded World 2019 in Germany.