Working towards an open ecosystem in autonomous driving – together with Sprin-D

Autonomous driving is one of the most complex technological challenges of the current decade and likely to be a game changer to the mobility industry. Despite impressive technological progress in recent years, it will still take significant innovations until fully autonomous vehicles reach public roads on a large scale. The software community has a demonstrated track record of achieving this with open collaboration models via open-source software components. Notable examples are the development of the Linux ecosystem, machine learning libraries such as TensorFlow or PyTorch, and the Robot Operating System (ROS and ROS 2).

Together with Sprin-D, the federal agency for disruptive innovation, we investigate how these blueprints can be applied in the autonomous driving industry. The target: building an open ecosystem of various players, from technology specialists up to traditional automotive companies as well as universities. This will speed-up the evaluation of innovative ideas in research projects as well as the transfer into safety-certified and reliable products.

This approach will ensure that the driveblocks autonomy platform is compatible with the sensors, actuators and compute units of varying manufacturers. In addition, it enables our customers to integrate the driveblocks algorithms easily with additional software, either self-developed or from other vendors.