Thank You to QNX Partners for a Wonderful CES

By Romain Saha
Strategic Alliances Manager
Blackberry QNX

It has been a few weeks since the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show. As with previous shows, BlackBerry QNX displayed industry-leading automotive technology in its booth. QNX  unveiled not one, but two concept cars - a Jaguar XJ, which showcased a unified cockpit experience, and a self-driving Lincoln MKZ, both of which were well-received by customers and media alike.

But we could not have reached this stage alone.

What may not be obvious is the incredible investment BlackBerry QNX and our ecosystem make in developing advanced technology demonstrations. In some cases, ecosystem partners work alongside BlackBerry QNX as key contributors. In other cases, ecosystem partners develop independent demonstrations integrating their technology along with QNX’s technology.

In every case, our partners’ dedication and hard work to turn ideas into reality is greatly appreciated.

At CES, for example, Livio, Qualcomm, Renesas, and Texas Instruments (TI), Polysync, University of Waterloo all helped showcase QNX’s technology innovations.

Livio hosted a demo of SmartDeviceLink (SDL) running on the QNX Platform for Infotainment. Pioneered by Ford, SDL allows seamless connectivity between smart phones and infotainment systems. In their private suite, TI demonstrated not one, but two instances of the QNX Platform for Infotainment running on their processor hardware. 

Meanwhile, Renesas took people for test rides in the autonomous Lincoln MKZ they developed together with BlackBerry QNX. The deep level of collaboration required to achieve this is a true testament to the partnership, which generated overwhelmingly positive feedback. The University of Waterloo and Polysync contributed valuable technology to the Lincoln MKZ.

QNX -based digital instrument clusters were also well represented at CES this year. In their concept Maserati Quattroporte, Qualcomm demonstrated a digital instrument cluster based on the soon-to-be-released 64-bit version of QNX’s OS also known as, SDP 7.0.

Our User Interface partners had great demos. At the Luxor hotel, DiSTI Corporation assembled an impressive collection of demos, with clusters running on Intel, Renesas and TI silicon. DiSTI teamed with CoreAVI to demonstrate a top-to-bottom BlackBerry QNX based safety critical cluster.

Rightware Kanzi was used in the digital cluster of the QNX’s Jaguar XJ concept car. This demonstration also displayed Kanzi Connect, which allowed drivers to personalize their dashboard interface in real-time using their smartphone.

CES 2017 was a tremendous success for BlackBerry QNX, thanks in no small part to the dedication of our partner ecosystem. Our partners help us offer more complete systems to customers and we thank them for their steadfast and incredible support. It is through such relationships that we can expand our ecosystem to the benefit of the industry.

 

BlackBerry QNX’s self-driving Lincoln MKZ – what’s under the hood?

Kerry Johnson

Sr. Product Manager

BlackBerry QNX

At CES 2017, BlackBerry-QNX unveiled its self-driving Lincoln MKZ. 

In years past , BlackBerry QNX has become known for displaying its innovative technology in its concept cars, which included infotainment, mobile device connectivity, digital instrument clusters and ADAS. This year BlackBerry QNX has outfitted a Lincoln MKZ to demonstrate a self-driving vehicle. The Lincoln MKZ is much more than a demonstration vehicle – it is an engineering prototype that allows BlackBerry QNX engineers to experiment with and develop new technologies for the autonomous vehicle market.

You may wonder why BlackBerry QNX chose a Lincoln MKZ for its autonomous driving car. The reason is straight forward. The 2017 Lincoln MKZ comes equipped, from the factory, with all the necessary drive-by-wire capabilities. All of the driving systems (throttle, gearbox, steering and braking) can be completely controlled electronically. By using this capability as a starting point, BlackBerry QNX and its partners are able to focus on adding other self-driving capabilities such as the sensors, route planning, and maneuvering.

While providing the foundational software, BlackBerry QNX did not build this self driving vehicle alone. We worked closely with Renesas, University of Waterloo, Polysync and Cogent, to put the car on the road.

The following is a brief walkthrough of the technologies inside the Lincoln MKZ:

BlackBerry QNX

BlackBerry QNX’s goal was to build an autonomous vehicle using commercial embedded processors and safety certified embedded operating system (OS). At the core of the design was QNX’s safety certified OS, which powers all of  the intelligent software modules. QNX’s middleware serves to integrate RADAR, LIDAR sensors , multiple camera inputs and vehicle networking. BlackBerry QNX provided a port of the OpenCV library to help with the vision processing functions delivered by Cogent. 

BlackBerry QNX also provided a port of Robot OS (ROS), so that the University of Waterloo could easily bring their self-driving software algorithms to the car without having to re-write large portions of code.

The ROS software components are not truly embedded, production oriented software. However, in building an autonomous car we chose a phased approach. We chose to use existing software to test and validate the solution. This saves time and allows flexible prototyping. Once the code is finalized we can convert it into an embedded solution.   

University of Waterloo

The University of Waterloo, one of Canada’s leading autonomous driving research institutions, contributed several software components, including static and dynamic environment perception, path planning, maneuvering and dispatching control commands to the various actuators. It should be noted that, at the outset of the project, the University of Waterloo already had a number of these components operational. Part of the activity was to port the software from Linux to QNX – a task made simple by BlackBerry QNX’s support for the POSIX standard.

Polysync

Polysync provided their framework for distributed communications and sensor integration. They also provided system data visualization tools, so the engineers could see how the system was operating from a central console.

Cogent

Cogent provided a number of vision processing algorithms that processed input from multiple camera sensors.

Renesas

The compute horsepower in the Lincoln MKZ comes from two Renesas R-Drive reference boards. Each Renesas R-Drive board has two Renesas R-Car system on chips (SoCs), each with quad-core ARM processors and image processing accelerators. Two R-Drive systems were used so that fail-over scenarios could be tested.

Sensors

The following sensors were used to construct a 360-degree view of the surroundings and to achieve accurate positioning of the car:

• 1 Delphi long range radar
• 1 Delphi short & medium range radar
• 2 Velodyne LIDARs
• 1 forward-facing Point Grey camera
• High precision GPS and IMU (Inertial Management Unit)

The car is now running on a test track.  In the following years BlackBerry QNX will continue to refine the system towards production oriented hardware and software.