By RemotiveLabs

Developing With Drive Playback

Volvo Cars is finding new ways to enable AAOS development in the automotive industry using standardized ways to communicate vehicle signal data (according to COVESA’s Vehicle Signal Specification VSS) with modern and collaborative tooling i.e., RemotiveLabs.

Developing apps and infotainment content in the automotive industry is cumbersome. The traditional tooling available is not sufficient to simulate multiple car data points. Volvo Cars developers are leading the way with new and flexible means of using vehicle signal data where third-party app developers can access it. Simultaneously this means that developers at OEMs are able to take full ownership of the debugging process.

Recent demo at the COVESA All Members Meeting

Together with RemotiveLabs, Volvo Cars recently demonstrated how they use the RemotiveBroker to playback drive cycles that map OEM proprietary vehicle signals and convert them to standardized vehicle signals (VSS) in an open-source Android Automotive emulator. This solution is used to populate a prototype or Android VHAL with real data and share it with third-party developers.

Peter Winzell, Volvo Cars explains: “For prototyping new applications, the approach with RemotiveLabs helping us populate the Android API with standardized signal data is really helpful. The APIs Google produces don’t cover fully what we need. We always need to add sensor data for relevant prototyping and this is a quite easy way of doing it.”

Volvo Cars software developers Kristoffer Nilsson and Peter Winzell together with RemotiveLabs Emil Dautovic. Renjith Rajagopal, Volvo Cars, demoed the solution live at the recent COVESA All Members Meeting.

By providing third-party developers with the tools they need to create innovative automotive apps, Volvo Cars supports the developer community and creates new ways of working relevant for the automotive industry in general. Further the setup enables exploration of ‘Edge Device Computation’ use cases by leveraging pre-recorded drive vehicle data from RemotiveBroker. Kristoffer Nilsson, Volvo Cars: “By providing real vehicle data from pre-recorded drive cycles using RemotiveLabs to AOSP (Android Open Source Project) through the Vehicle HAL, we open up the possibilities to create powerful open source emulators and tools to attract the developer community and make the development of automotive applications more available”.

The importance of automotive collaboration

RemotiveLabs recently joined COVESA due to the collaborative possibilities that their initiatives including VSS helps to enable between OEMs and third-party developers. You can test in the RemotiveLabs demo how to convert OEM data to VSS format – try it yourself at RemotiveLabs demo. Initiatives under the COVESA umbrella will have a large impact on automotive software development going forward and OEMs engagement and collaboration will be key for the success. Two additional such initiatives are the AOSP app framework standardization and VISS (the Vehicle Information Service Specification hosted by W3C) where the RemotiveLabs platform could serve as a vehicle data provider.