TOKYO, March 13, 2024 – Autoware Foundation, home to Autoware, the world’s leading open-source project for autonomous driving, is excited to announce the extension of its collaboration with Arm via Autoware’s popular Open AD Kit, the first SOAFEE blueprint.

Several industry leaders, including the Autoware Foundation and Autoware Foundation member companies, have collaborated with Arm on the launch of a suite of new virtual platforms and software solutions based on the latest Arm® Automotive Enhanced (AE) technologies, announced today. These are aimed at addressing the growing need to shorten hardware and software development cycles in the age of the Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV).

Arm is a premium member of the Autoware Foundation and a consistent contributor to the Autoware project, particularly to the Open AD Kit. Open AD Kit is a project that aims to make the Autoware project compatible with the software-defined vehicle architectures, including the SOAFEE architecture.

As a part of today’s launch, a mixed-criticality concept will be introduced to Open AD Kit by deploying Autoware’s containerized control feature on safety-critical (RTOS) environments. The concept runs the main Autoware compute functions on an Arm application processor which communicates with the vehicle control functions that run on an Arm real-time processor. These functions can run on both virtual and physical hardware.

This extended partnership is built upon the successful CES 2024 Open AD Kit demonstration in collaboration between the Autoware Foundation, eSync Alliance and SOAFEE, and participated by Arm, AWS, Excelfore, Leo Drive, RedHat and TIER IV. Presented during the CES 2024, at the AWS booth, TIER IV booth and the COVESA event adjacent to CES 2024, the Open AD Kit demo showcased containerized planning-related Autoware workloads working on the cloud and at the edge.

In the future, extending this effort into virtual hardware utilization will harness the advantages of cloud-native development and will pave the way for a shift-left revolution. The shift-left revolution will unlock access for future IPs even before the silicon is made available. Autoware Foundation is working with Arm to bring these new technologies into the Autoware project.

“Our continued collaboration with Arm aims to allow the SDV ecosystem to demonstrate their SDV solutions on the Open AD Kit, using it as a reference software platform. We have good momentum and are actively pursuing new partners to introduce their SDV technologies into the Open AD Kit project,” said Samet Kütük, Board Member and Executive Director at the Autoware Foundation.

“The proliferation of AI in automotive and the exponential increase in software needs of modern vehicles means we have to rethink product development for automakers to remain competitive,” said Suraj Gajendra, vice president of products and solutions, Automotive Line of Business, Arm. “Collaborating with industry leaders like the Autoware Foundation on new virtual platforms and software solutions built on leading-edge automotive hardware from Arm will ensure our partners can keep pace with the growing demands of software-defined vehicles.”

About the Autoware Foundation

The Autoware Foundation is a non-profit organization that hosts the Autoware project, the world’s leading open-source software project for autonomous driving. The Autoware project is built on Robot Operating System (ROS), and through using open source, it lowers the entry barrier to autonomous driving technology and enables commercial deployment of autonomous driving in a broad range of vehicles and applications.

Autoware democratizes autonomous driving technology through open-source development and is committed to creating synergies among the world’s leading technology companies, academic/non-profit organizations and individual contributors.

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