Member Profile – Real-Time Innovations (RTI)

What does your company do? What services or products do you provide?  

Real-Time Innovations (RTI) is the largest software framework company for autonomous systems. RTI software runs the communication for mission-critical systems across industries, from space launches to combat management on U.S. Navy ships, next-generation medical robotics, and autonomous/semi-autonomous vehicles from simulation to production. We are the leading vendor of products compliant with the Object Management Group® (OMG®) Data Distribution Service (DDS™) standard. The company is privately held and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California with regional offices in Colorado, Spain, and Singapore.

I’m proud to say that today there are over one million vehicles on the road running on RTI software. Connext Drive is an interoperable, secure, and scalable communication framework that simplifies and accelerates the development of software-defined vehicles (SDVs). Based on the DDS middleware standard, Connext Drive distributes vehicle data flow in real time across systems to ensure vehicle safety and performance. It provides an interoperable data backbone for heterogeneous systems across key SDV use cases: ECU, zonal gateways, high performance compute, ADAS, digital cluster, telematics and cloud, in addition to OEM-specific applications.

We offer OEMs an accelerated path to building safety-critical systems for electric and autonomous vehicles, as we are the first DDS provider to meet all major automotive software safety standards, with ASPICE CL1, ISO 21434, and ISO 26262 process certifications.

We help to simplify development across platforms, with direct integrations into AUTOSAR Classic, AUTOSAR Adaptive, DDS, and ROS 2 platforms. OEMs can shorten development cycles by enabling their teams to leverage our data-centric communication with familiar ecosystem architectures without the need for custom programming.

Why did you join COVESA and how long has your company been a member?

RTI joined COVESA in late 2022, at the request of several COVESA members, who asked for our help when the organization was starting to explore the role of DDS for communication interoperability and standards (specifically VSS and the cooperation with AUTOSAR). Over the past few years, OEM interest in DDS has risen sharply. As the global leader in DDS technology for automotive (and other industries), RTI engineers are experienced at integrating DDS with other standards such as SOME/IP, FRANCA IDL, ROS 2, and AUTOSAR data serialization.  So we’re here to help, and to listen, learn, and actively participate in the work of this consortium.  

What benefits does your participation in COVESA bring to your company and business? 

COVESA is a thriving community that is working towards open, collaborative, and impactful technology for connected vehicles. Like COVESA, RTI too is at the forefront of technology innovation that will enable the next generation of automotives.  In particular, we are interested in next-generation communication that simplifies system-to-system data exchange. The new software architectures provide major benefits to enable key functionalities, but if it goes in the wrong direction, it could result in large increases to the cost of integration. It’s therefore critical for auto companies to have access to a common architecture with standard communication models that can be shared across platforms and suppliers, in order to accelerate the development and cost optimization for the complete supply chain. VSS aims to solve this problem, and its impact will go beyond development. For organizations such as RTI, this will bring the focus on enhancing functionalities and not contextualizing on custom vehicle signal specifications. 

Which COVESA collaborative project(s) or Birds of a Feather (BoF) is your company engaged in, and why is that beneficial to your business?

As a leader in DDS technology, RTI is actively participating in the Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS), which defines a common approach for describing vehicle data. We recently authored a technical paper on the topic of DDS as the backbone of SDV Interoperability and anticipate additional contributions in the coming year.

RTI believes that DDS could enhance the performance of the widely-adopted VSS data model, and we’re here to help with some of the integration modeling work to make this happen. In addition, RTI is a key contributor to the interoperability work with AUTOSAR. RTI has been a key member of AUTOSAR, defining the integration of DDS in both AUTOSAR Adaptive and AUTOSAR Classic. In addition, I sit on the Board of Directors of COVESA, where I contribute to discussions shaping the future of this important automotive organization.