Through collaboration and innovation we will succeed

What good is knowledge if it’s not shared?

With this thought in mind, our teams recently came together at our HQ in Vienna, for the TTTech Auto Product & Technology Day.

TTTech Auto Product & Technology Day 2022, from left to right: Marouane Chouhou (Software Developer, Product Innovation), Jakob Zwirchmayr (Software Architect, Product Innovation), Dr. Dirk Linzmeier (CEO) and Stefan Poledna (CTO)

After a warm welcome from our CTO Stefan Poledna, we were taken on a journey to discover the range of products and solutions that we have at TTTech Auto, but also received some exciting insights into the latest advances in the field of modern automotive industry.

Prof. Radu Grosu, Head of the Cyber-Physical-Systems Division, Technical University of Vienna, and one of the supervisors in an international PhD program on “Trustworthy Autonomous Systems”,  provided a keynote Enabling Trustworthy Autonomy.  We learned more about how artificial intelligence (AI) can improve automated driving experience and be trusted by the public. Prof. Grosu presented some of his research in the field of neural networks and deep learning, which are used in automotive use cases such as lane keeping and parallel parking. Highlighting that the automotive industry today is a multidisciplinary field where various advanced technologies can bring us closer to the fully autonomous vehicle.

After this interesting presentation, our Manager Product Innovation, Bernhard Leiner, talked about the evolution towards a more flexible MotionWise, TTTech Auto's safe vehicle software platform. He explained how we increase customer value through fast development loops. By focusing on flexible solutions, we provide software developers and system integrators with a modular environment and a seamless experience. That's why we work with and extend technologies like Robotic Operating System (ROS2) and Data Distribution Service (DDS) to ensure we meet our users' needs. "What do application developers want? Ideally, a development framework that is flexible and modular, open source and offers powerful features for debugging, testing, visualization and more," explained Bernhard. This is especially crucial for early prototyping, but we shall also strive for a seamless transition towards series programs with MotionWise.

Fast development tools visualization

Jens Kaszubiak, Vice President Quality Engineering & CX at TTTech Auto, spoke about successful practices in software development to achieve automation. He emphasized the need for standardization to ensure consistent quality of a product and compatibility between different parts of the system. Jens compared craft to industrialization and explained how we achieve automation and higher throughput in the software factory without compromising the quality of our solutions.

Beside TTTech Auto’s presentations, we had the opportunity to learn more about TTTech's approach to the configuration challenges in time-triggered systems from Silviu Craciunas, a corporate scientist at TTTech Labs. Silviu explored how to tackle system complexity, focusing on real-world scenarios where there may be hundreds of applications running on a large number of resources and subject to hundreds of constraints. Since the number of atoms in the observable universe is significantly smaller than the number of possible (correct and incorrect) configurations in this case, the achievement of TTTech Labs team in finding the correct configurations in a very short time frame is even more admirable. Their insights into time-driven scheduling are also immensely valuable to the MotionWise Global Schedular solution.

With our algorithms we are able to find correct configurations also for complex systems in a relatively short time

At TTTech Auto, safety is behind everything we do, and we are proud of our aerospace heritage in safe real-time systems. We are also proud that our colleagues at TTTech Aerospace are making an amazing contribution to lunar exploration by providing cutting-edge communications technologies for NASA 's Artemis program. We Are Going, a great phrase from the title of Product Manager Aerospace David Jelem's speech, encapsulates a tremendous amount of knowledge that takes us further, or in this case, higher.

Paraphrasing a well-known quote by Norman Vincent Peale, we say: Let's aim for the Moon - even if we miss, we might land among the stars. This can reflect on any field, but also inspire us in the automotive industry to always aim high and provide world-class solutions for safe mobility. Initiatives like Product & Technology Day remind us of the true power of collaboration. In our efforts to bring novel, state-of-the-art solutions to market, we can only succeed if we share our knowledge and create mindgrowing ideas together. We will meet again next year to consolidate our knowledge and once more set the course for the future.