Practical research of RT-middleware in intelligent vehicles

The robotization of vehicles has accelerated in recent years. Although the automobile field previously placed importance on the research and development of hardware, that of software has recently been more important. Standardization, generalization, and renewability are needed for efficient research and development of software. However, software platforms for research and education are not sufficiently developed, especially in the automobile field. This study aims to develop a software platform specialized for research on intelligent vehicle systems or for efficient learning, based on robotics technology (RT)-middleware developed for robotics. We propose a software module for intelligent vehicle systems using OpenRTM-aist, which is a reference implementation of RT-middleware, and then validate its usability. In this paper, the importance of applying RT-middleware in the automobile field is explained, and achievements regarding the development of the software module development are discussed.