TOKYO— Automotive technology is speeding ever forward, as seen in the growing buzz over self-driving and “connected” cars and their potential to transform the driving experience. One of the latest battlefields in the race to create a superior car is automotive operating systems, with developers competing to create basic software for vehicles much in the way that they vied for supremacy in personal computers and smartphones.
In Japan, the key players on the automotive OS front are not carmakers but software developers, including SCSK and Fuji Soft. One of the leading names in the field is Hiroaki Takada, a professor at Nagoya University and expert on automotive onboard software.
Last autumn, he set up a company — Automotive Platform Technology Japan — on his campus to develop a platform for operating automotive control systems. He and a team of young engineers have been working together there to develop a new OS.
With conventional automotive systems, every component, including the engine, brakes, motor and power steering mechanism, is controlled by a separate microcontroller installed with a program written specifically for that particular function.
But as vehicles grow more sophisticated, “developing software for them has become a bigger, more complex job,” Takada said.
Now, programmers have to write over 10 million lines of code when a new car is developed, gobbling up a large chunk of an automaker’s resources.
That burden will only grow with the advent of artificial intelligence-equipped cars that use data collected from sensors. Programmers will have to write software capable of even more complex functions.
There’s an app for that
What Takada’s team is doing is creating a platform for automobiles much in the way that the iOS and Android OS platforms underpin Apple iPhone and Google Android smartphones. Creating apps for such a platform to control the engine, brakes and other automotive components will considerably ease the development burden by obviating the need to churn out huge amounts of code. It will also make it easier to add new functions.
Takada’s project has attracted the interest of companies that develop automotive-control software, including Fuji Soft, Canon Software, Ryoden and Sunny Giken. All of these companies have agreed to invest in APTJ. (Asia Nikkei)
