The Eclipse Foundation — the not-for-profit corporation that acts as a steward of the Eclipse development community — today launched a new mobility project for autonomous cars and emerging modes of transport. Dubbed the OpenMobility Working Group, it will focus on “open” and “shared” collaboration to ease urban planning issues around driverless cars, traffic simulations, modeling, and other future transportation requirements.
“To succeed in today’s software-driven markets, automotive companies and urban planners know they have to innovate at digital scale and speed,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “OpenMobility is the latest example of the collaborative work the Eclipse Foundation is supporting in the connected automotive mobility ecosystem. With our working groups, our community is driving the evolution and broad adoption of mobility modeling, simulation, and testing technologies.”
OpenMobility — which builds on the Eclipse Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO), a freely available traffic analysis toolset that originated at the German Aerospace Center — aims to establish a common platform for civil engineering, in part with tools designed to simulate interactions among pedestrians, vehicles, and communication systems. These tools let users predict the dynamics of “almost all” moving objects in a city’s motorways, railways, or waterways, including passenger vehicles, buses, trains, trams, bicycles, motorbikes, pedestrians, ships, and even freight containers.
The Eclipse Foundation believes the suite will become critical in testing driver assistance systems, predicting and optimizing traffic, and evaluating new mobility-as-a-service businesses. And in the coming years it hopes it will foster the sharing of intellectual property, result in better quality assurance and testing, accelerate product development, and let ecosystem participants collaborate across industries.
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In addition to the OpenMobility Working Group, the Eclipse Foundation supports Eclipse OpenPASS, an organization that provides modules for simulating driver assistance and automated driving systems, and Eclipse openMDM, which offers frameworks for standardized management of measured data.
“Traffic simulation is used to accelerate the digital development process at Bosch,” said Bosch manager Christian Wiegand. “By modeling the vehicle movements in real traffic conditions, we can better assess new technologies, such as connectivity and automated driving. Furthermore, traffic simulation can provide valuable input for powertrain development.”
The OpenMobility Working Group’s launch follows the reveal of the Linux Foundation’s Linux in Safety Applications (ELISA), an open source project comprising programs intended to help companies build and certify Linux-based systems whose failure could result in loss of human life, significant property damage, or environmental damage. And it comes as self-driving car companies increasingly open-source some of the tools they use to train, analyze, and triage their systems.
In February, Uber released Autonomous Visualization System, a web-based platform for vehicle data, while GM’s Cruise Automation recently introduced a graphics library of two- and three-dimensional scenes, called Worldview. And in March Nvidia made its autonomous vehicle simulator Drive Constellation generally available.
