News & Press

Green Hills Software with Apex.AI Offers Production-Focused Safe and Secure Automated Drive Software Platform Solutions

INTEGRITY RTOS is the ASIL D foundation for ROS 2-compatible Apex.OS framework for next-generation automated driving systems

LAS VEGAS — January 5, 2022 — CES 2022, Booth #6359 — Green Hills Software, the worldwide leader in embedded safety and security, in collaboration with Apex.AI, the leader in safety frameworks and middleware for mobility solutions, today announced the availability of their production-ready ROS 2-compatible development framework for safety and security-critical transportation solutions. This highly optimized solution is a software platform that combines the safety and security of the INTEGRITY^® RTOS with Apex.AI’s Apex.OS, a fork of ROS 2, made real-time, reliable, deterministic, and certified for safety-critical applications. The combined solution gives OEMs and Tier 1s a faster and lower cost path to production for their ROS / ROS 2 prototypes in vehicle domains such as ADAS and autonomous driving that require the highest levels of automotive safety, including up to ISO 26262 ASIL D.

Developers of safety-critical transportation systems face a gap for successfully migrating the prototypes they developed with ROS / ROS 2 to a production-focused real-time and safety-certified computing platform and into production. Moving from high-powered engineering mule test vehicles to production vehicles is challenging. The computing platforms of production vehicles are composed of a complex mix of heterogeneous multicore processors, limited memory, mixed-criticality services, and multiple asynchronous communication networks. Moreover, production vehicles require high reliability, real-time determinism, safety and security as defined by the ISO 26262 automotive safety standard and ISO 21434 automotive cybersecurity standard. The products and expertise from Green Hills Software and Apex.AI provide this purpose-built path to production.

“We love that Green Hills shares our vision for how developers can speed prototypes into production for automotive domains including ADAS and autonomous driving. What we’re doing together is part of the recipe for realizing the next generation of software-defined vehicles,” said Joe Speed, Apex.AI VP of Product & Chief Evangelist.

“The combination of the Green Hills production-proven, safe and secure INTEGRITY RTOS with its advanced ROS-aware development tools and industry-leading C/C++ compilers provide the necessary foundation to the production-focused Apex.AI ROS 2 safety framework and middleware for today’s automated drive systems,” said Dan Mender, VP of Business Development, Green Hills Software. “Our collaboration with the Apex.AI team provides OEMs and their partners a highly optimized ROS 2-based foundational software development platform allowing OEMs to focus on unique software-defined vehicle application differentiations.”

The INTEGRITY RTOS separation kernel is pre-certified to ISO 26262 ASIL D and has adopted the automotive cybersecurity standard ISO 21434. It provides the safe, secure, and deterministic run-time foundation to run, separate, and protect complex software that performs critical functions, such as the Apex.OS and Apex.Middleware, from less critical aspects of the platform. INTEGRITY securely separates critical and non-critical software components and guarantees that system-critical applications receive the necessary hardware and software resources, even when faced with malicious or unintended events. In addition, the advanced ROS-aware MULTI^® integrated development environment (IDE) helps developers find and fix the most difficult software bugs faster, reducing development time and cost while raising code quality. The MULTI IDE, with its ISO 26262 ASIL D safety-qualified compilers and safety-certified C/C++ run time libraries, provides developers with the proper tools for creating system critical application code that requires safety certification.

Apex.OS is a real-time, functionally-safe ROS 2 distribution that abstracts the complexity of underlying hardware, middleware, kernel, interfaces, and drivers into simple to use, robust, reliable, and safe APIs. Apex.OS Cert is TÜV Nord certified for ISO 26262 ASIL D. Apex.Middleware provides the discovery and communication between applications with zero-copy and a small, fixed latency and CPU budget cost regardless of data size or type.

Availability
See a demonstration of the Green Hills and Apex.AI solution at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) January 5 – 8 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Booth #6359 in the West Hall.

The solution is available today to early qualified customers. Contact Green Hills Software for more information.

About Green Hills Software

Founded in 1982, Green Hills Software is the worldwide leader in embedded safety and security. In 2008, the Green Hills INTEGRITY-178 RTOS was the first and only operating system to be certified by NIAP (National Information Assurance Partnership comprised of NSA & NIST) to EAL 6+, High Robustness, the highest level of security ever achieved for any software product. Our open architecture integrated development solutions address deeply embedded, absolute security and high-reliability applications for the military/avionics, medical, industrial, automotive, networking, consumer and other markets that demand industry-certified solutions. Green Hills Software is headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA, with European headquarters in the United Kingdom. Visit Green Hills Software at https://www.ghs.com.

Green Hills, the Green Hills logo, MULTI and INTEGRITY are trademarks or registered trademarks of Green Hills Software LLC, in the U.S. and/or internationally. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.