Wind River and Baidu collaborate to build autonomous driving platform

Wind River®, a leading provider of intelligent edge software, recently announced that it has partnered with Baidu to develop a next-generation autonomous vehicle solution. This joint proof-of-concept solution has been successfully completed and includes a software architecture based on AUTOSAR Adaptive and the Baidu Apollo autonomous driving open platform, designed to address the various challenges faced by the next generation of software-defined vehicles.

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

“The inherent complexity and diversity of autonomous driving technology, coupled with the divergent viewpoints of many automakers, makes the path to mass production of autonomous vehicles even more difficult,” said Brenda Herold, vice president of industry markets at Wind River. “Strong efforts to promote standardization will help promote the development of the entire industry, and we look forward to working with innovators like Baidu to accelerate the development, testing, and deployment of the entire autonomous vehicle field.”

“Any industry must have standards to move forward and make significant progress,” said Wang Jingao, executive director of Baidu and general manager of Baidu Apollo platform R&D. “A secure and reliable open platform can not only help companies create autonomous driving systems faster, but also make the technology of the entire ecosystem more interoperable. We are very pleased to work with software leaders like Wind River to jointly address the various challenges facing autonomous vehicles.”

The proof-of-concept solution demonstrated this time is based on the Baidu Apollo autonomous driving platform and Wind River's AUTOSAR Adaptive-based software architecture, while supporting heterogeneous systems with mixed criticality safety requirements. Open source software and non-safety-critical applications (such as infotainment) can run on the Wind River Linux platform, while safety-critical applications that must be verified are supported by VxWorks®, a commercial-grade RTOS, to meet their specific performance requirements. Using only one software architecture on the same hardware can be compatible with both safety-critical and non-safety-critical applications, which significantly reduces the bill of materials (BOM) cost and vehicle energy consumption for automakers.

Wind River can support various computing needs of customers, create appropriate computing environments according to the number of Linux workloads, and ensure that these workloads work seamlessly with VxWorks RTOS to meet strict real-time and deterministic requirements. Moreover, customers can use open source software and certified software at the same time, combining the convenience of open source software with the proven security and reliability of certified software, making their development work more cost-effective.